Café Con Leche

This city never sleeps. There’s always life. There’s always death. And those who are caught between those forces, their faces weary and their spirits crushed, are the walking dead of this city. The poor, those who’s skin color immediately makes them suspect, and those whose lives depend on the underbelly of this colossus of a city, they are the worshippers of Santa Muerte. The lady of death, her skeletal form adorned in shiny robes, her shrine adorned with flowers, alcohol, cigarettes, and candles and in her hand a scythe and a globe. Mictecacihuatl; her ancient name long forgotten in the annals of the history of the victorious. Now she watches over, a nook in a wall next to a busy street, the glass front of her shrine smudged not with dust but with the hand prints of her devotees. The dim blue light inside the shrine lighting up her skeletal face, her blessings offered through the dark, empty sockets of her eyes ensuring a holy death for all who ask.

Carlos always wondered how she would evoke such devotion, the wilted flowers changed for fresh ones each day, the alcohol and cigarettes replenished, the smudges on the glass even more pronounced each day. He disliked the fact that he felt intimidated to do something; some flailing gesture of worship to this saint, a means to hide that deep down he felt he did not belong in this city. 

His parents had come to the Mexico City as migrants. He had been born in a small clinic in the heart of the city. His beautiful, petit mother struggling to give him life, after twenty hours had pleaded to the doctor to perform a C-section, her light skin turning pale with every contraction. When he was old enough to understand, she would tell him about the color of the powder blue walls of the tiny operating theatre, the voice of the doctor speaking in panicked whispers to the nurse next to him, his father’s stocky figure as he stood next to her, his eyes filled with tears. She would also never forget to tell him about the miracle of the night he was born. The story of the appearance of the Lady of Mictlan, her white robes glowing in the corner of her eyes as her body surrendered to the anesthesia and the sensation of her belly taught like a ripe watermelon being touched ever so gently by skeletal hands. 

“La Senora Blanca protected me and you that night……” Laura would say, her large brown eyes looking directly into his. He would always notice that her voice would change when she spoke about the Lady, a tone of reverence flooding every word. Despite her husband’s protests, Laura would always find a way to keep a small plastic statue of the saint in the closet in their bedroom, hidden between the carefully folded clothes. She had been a devotee until her death. The cancer that had eaten through her lungs, had spread to her heart and as she struggled to breathe that night, it was Carlos who had nestled her body. Laura had once again told him about the White Lady, that her presence made her feel comforted and that she was ready to die. As the sun rose and the city woke to another day his mother had died in his arms; her face shrunken, her brown eyes glazed with the veneer of death and on her mouth a faint trace of a smile. 

It was five thirty in the morning and he was on his way to work. He was thankful he had worn a sweater on top of his white shirt, the cold wind blowing towards him making him cross his arms in front of his chest. It was late-August; the brief Mexico City summer already over, the rainy season would bring with it the cold, persistent rain that would pelt down every day. Then he would always long for the sunshine and the milder temperatures of San Miguel de Allende; the narrow cobblestone streets, the brightly colored houses their history written on their façades, his maternal grandmother’s cooking, and the hot chocolate laced with chile in the evenings. They were both dead now, his mother and grandmother, the memories of their love his only companions. 

As he walked by the shrine of the White Lady, he tripped as he tried to avoid stepping on a few bottles of cheap tequila placed on the sidewalk. As he found his balance, he accidently placed his hand on the glass front of the shine, his handprint joining the rest of the smudges. And at that moment, he happened to glance at the skeletal face of the saint, and he was reminded of her mother’s face as she lay dying in his arms, the warmth of her body draining away as the minutes passed. He quickly moved his hand away from the glass and rearranged the offerings on the sidewalk and continued to walk, brushing away thoughts of his mother and the Saint. Their strange amalgamation disturbing him.

As he waited to cross one of the main avenues of the city, the traffic had already picked up and there were more people walking on the streets. A man standing next to him brushed against his arm with his backpack completely unaware that he had done so, the man’s face completely focused on the faded pedestrian crossing painted on the street. The physical contact completely devoid of any relevance. Carlos looked at the group of people who had gathered around him now, each waiting for the turn to cross the street; a moment of intimacy between strangers. And as the light turned to green, as if a switch turned on they all started walking across the street, each trying to find a path through the waves of people coming from the opposite side of the street; shoulders brushing against other, hands touching hands and steps taken in unison only to detach themselves immediately as they reached the other side of the crossing. Each back to their own isolation. 

As he walked by the small park he turned to see the green iron benches empty except for a few homeless men who used them as a shelter during the night; the greenery arresting his eyes for a moment amid all the dull colors of the neighborhood. The café he worked at was only a block away, and he slowed his pace as he saw Enrique, a man who he assumed was as old as his father who sold pan dulce and cheap coffee from a makeshift food cart.

“Hola Quique!” Carlos waved his hand, revealing an unexpected smile that dimpled his cheeks.

“Brother, how are you this morning?”

“Good……freezing my balls off!” The younger man chuckled as she stood in front of the food cart.

“A concha?” Enrique said pointing to the soft bun covered in a delicate pattern of white glaze. Carlos nodded his head in agreement. 

“And a coffee with milk too.” He added as he watched the man hand him the pastry and then turn to the large coffee dispenser. Enrique would always add extra condensed milk into his coffee, and hand him the white Styrofoam cup to his hand with a wide grin. Although they did not speak much with each other there was a far deeper connection between them. The fact that like his father Enrique was born in Queretaro, a provincial town, meant that when they did speak there would be much nostalgia to share. Even though he had not seen his father in almost two years, speaking to Enrique would always make him feel guilty. He had distanced himself from his father, secretly holding him responsible for Laura’s death, the two men not having spoken since her passing. There was something about the way Enrique would speak that reminded Carlos of his father. Describing his life in his home town, the colonial buildings and the arid land surrounding it, the vineyards that seemed to thrive miraculously and his own family that he had had to leave behind to ensure that at least his youngest daughter would be able to complete school and enter university, seemed to make him happy. And maybe like Enrique, his father too had to give up something of his soul to find his footing in Mexico City. 

This was also a city of loss, Carlos reminded himself. One could easily lose oneself in the tangle of complicities that would involve integrating. And for those who could not weather their loss of self, there was chaos and confusion waiting in its wake and for those who managed to survive the ordeal there was emptiness and loneliness. He sometimes wondered if his father was indeed one of those who had become lost in the complexities of starting anew in a strange environment; the alcohol becoming for him his only means of feeling like he belonged. And maybe he, with his confidence and youth would have seemed like a blatant reminder of his father’s own failures. And maybe that’s why every time Cesar would berate or beat Carlos there had had been a look of sadness in his eyes, lost deep within his alcohol fueled anger.

As Carlos sipped the coffee thickly laced with sweet condensed milk, he was reminded of his mother. He felt comforted, like an embrace of a loving parent ensuring him that all was okay.  Café con leche would always be Laura’s choice of drink, even when it was hot during the brief summers she would always make herself a cup of coffee thickly laden with condensed milk. As he started walking he thought it was ironic that he worked as a barista, making cappuccinos and espressos until his arms would hurt from the repeated movements, all the while he would long for a cup of the café con leche that Enrique would make from his food cart. 

Now as he passed the homeopathy pharmacy, Carlos looked at his reflection on the glass window, and then shook his head as if to brush off his own vanity. The old man standing behind the counter waved at him, his teeth eerily visible in the semi-darkness of the cavernous store, the dark wooden panels on the walls only absorbing any kind of light that entered through the front windows. There were hardly any customers, and yet the owner would open his store each day. He would spend an hour in the morning cleaning, dusting each glass bottle and vial, then cleaning the glass windows with pieces of old newspaper until they were spotless. He would never fail to wave and greet anyone who passed by or happened to peek into the antiquated store. Carlos knew that his name was Juan Manuel, and that even though his two daughters had insisted that he sell the pharmacy, he had adamantly refused saying that he would continue to work until he could not walk to work by himself. Although he was almost eighty years old, Juan Manuel still possessed a spring in his step as he went about his work in the store and attended to the few loyal customers who would visit him. Carlos could only marvel at that older man’s resilience and will power.

Once he passed the closed doors of the two apartment buildings he could already see the window boxes with the marigolds that decorated the façade of the coffee shop. He glanced at his watch; the time was six-fifteen in the morning. There would only be fifteen minutes before the store opened, and he would have to rush. He could already feel that strange mixture of anticipation and ennui that he would experience at the beginning of the day. For the most part he knew exactly how his day would unravel; the shifts he would take at the espresso maker, the shifts behind the cash register and then his shift cleaning and rearranging everything for the next day.  And then his walk back to the small apartment where he grew up, overlooking the roof of a rundown chapel that no one worshipped and maybe if his friends were willing to meet, a couple of beers at the small bar in the neighborhood. And then back in his bed, staring at the ceiling above him revealing a slowly growing water stain like tree rings, the familiar smells of the home he had known all his life surrounding him and the muffled sounds of the traffic in the street below lulling him until he fell asleep, the pain in his arms dulled by the fatigue that would overcome him. His phone rarely rang; there were no friendly calls, no sweet nothings to be shared with a lover, no expectations. Carlos prided himself in this freedom; he knew every nook and cranny of it.

“Yo, brother!” Diego greeted him, the two men then sharing a quick hug, each patting the other’s shoulders. 

“How was your date last evening?” Carlos asked as he held the door of the coffee shop open. Diego had been sweeping the small strip of side walk in front of leaves and debris. 

“Great! She’s a gem!” Diego grinned, revealing a smile that was completely disarming.

“I need details! Good for you, man!” Carlos spoke, turning his body to his friend.

“It’s high time you end that solitary life of yours too….” 

Carlos tutted and walked in smiling, closing the door behind him, knowing his friend meant well. Inside there were two others behind the counter. The younger of the men, Yair had started working a week ago and was still awkward as he greeted Carlos, his skinny arm rising just enough in a weak wave as he looked up from sink where he was washing the cups where they would serve coffee. It was Miguel who stepped down from the raised dais where they made coffee to shake hands and greet Carlos. They had both begun work at the cafe at the same time, and despite their friendship there was an unacknowledged rivalry between them. While both men never talked about it, there were moments where they would argue over who would make the best coffee, the tone of friendliness masking their need to establish a hierarchy.  

Once inside the back room that served as a staff room and a storage space, Carlos took off the sweater and hung it on one of the wooden hooks on the wall and dumped his backpack on the ground next to the wall, taking only his cellphone which he put in the back pocket of his jeans. With a swift movement, he pulled out his black apron from the chair and wore it around his waist. He looked at the watch again. 

It was six thirty in the morning and the first customers would start walking in soon. 

He walked behind the counter and stood in front of the espresso machine, its shiny silver surface reflecting his face. As he set the coffee beans to be ground, his hand moving without him having to look at the panel of the grinder, Carlos sighed. He caught a glimpse of his face. It had been a familiar look; one that had in the past made him swear that he would not let himself be a victim to. It was an expression he had seen in his father’s eyes many times; the sadness of a broken spirit, its hopes and dreams long buried and forgotten. 

He was twenty-seven and he wondered how long he would spend behind the counter of a cafe, behind the shiny façade of the expresso machine before he would be completely defeated. Before he would simply become a reflection of his father, unable to face himself in the mirror, his younger self accusing him of giving up hope.

By mid-afternoon most of the customers had already had their fix of caffeine; the next wave customers would come in closer to the time when they would complete the day’s work. This was the time that the men got a moment to chat among themselves, joking and teasing each other. 

“So, tell us more about your date with Sofia?” It was Miguel who addressed Diego now. 

“She’s fantastic…. and smart.” 

“What does she do for a living?” Carlos asked.

“She’s a physiotherapist and she does well. But more than that, man……I’ve never felt like that with someone before. She might be the one.” Diego looked up from the cash register and smiled. He had always been a romantic and despite Carlos’s teasing, he had remained so. While he fell in and out of love, it was Carlos who had been there to listen to him talk about his disappointments. 

“It’s nice to have someone……and if you find the right person you are set for life. You might want to try it sometime….” Diego continued looking directly at his friend.

“There’s more things to do in life than falling in love……I don’t plan to spend the rest of my life behind a coffee machine, friend. There must be more than this? There must be more than just finding a partner and starting a family?” 

“But Carlos, yes, have ambition but there will be a time in your life you will need something more than just fulfilling your dreams……. We all need to share our lives…. man, we were designed for that. If you go on like this, you will turn into a regular curmudgeon….and then even I won’t be able to help you.” 

“Urgh……. you are talking crap now…. designed for that!  That’s a lot of bullshit if anything.” 

Diego patted his friend’s shoulder and smiled knowingly. They both turned towards the door as the small bell hung over it rang softly. It was a young woman, her shoulder’s burdened by a backpack, her hair falling on her shoulders and across her face so that as she looked for her wallet in the bag it covered most of her features. Diego cheekily grinned and gestured at Carlos who was already behind the expresso machine, most of his face covered by it. The other man ignored him. 

As she walked towards the counter, she dropped her wallet on the floor and as she reached for it she lost her balance but quickly managed to right herself. Blood rushed to her cheeks as she realized that she was being clumsy in front of a captive audience, imagining them judging her.

“Sorry……” she said finally standing up and walking to the counter. Diego grinned, amused by her clumsiness. Once at the counter she ordered a coffee with milk and paid for it with cash. 

She chose the table closest to the window, away from most of the other tables, couches and chairs in the café. It was clear she wanted to isolate herself. By the time her coffee with milk was ready, there was line of customers waiting to be served. There was hardly time to observe what she was doing. As Carlos raised his head to see the floor of the café he noticed that most of the tables and chairs were occupied by couples meeting for a cup of coffee before they headed back to their homes; a moment to share with someone you loved before battling for space and privacy in the crowded metro, the buses or the sidewalks. 

By now he could feel the pain in his wrist growing, his index finger and thumb feeling weak. As he waited for the milk in the small stainless steel jug to be steamed for the cappuccino he was making, he thought of the White Lady, the skeletal fingers holding a globe, clutching it with vigor. Maybe he should pray to her for direction. Once again he shook his head, amused by his own frivolity. That’s when he heard the ceramic cup hitting the floor, breaking into pieces spilling the by now lukewarm liquid on the floor. He looked over the top of the expresso machine and saw that some of the customers in the café were now looking towards the young woman who had been sitting in the corner. She was already crouching on the floor picking up the pieces of the broken cup. After a few minutes the couples who had watched her with curiosity turned back to their conversations; the girl picking up the pieces of the broken cup fading into the background.

By now Yair was already near her with a mop to clean the pale brown liquid on the floor. That was when Carlos noticed that he was smiling shyly, his body leaning towards the young woman who was now standing away from the table. Before he could look again, Miguel was telling him the next order of coffee and he was once again lost in between ratios of coffee and milk.

Diego patted his back and bid goodbye. It was seven in the evening, by now there were only a few customers in the café. The street outside was filled with cars stuck in the rush hour traffic, their blinking red and amber lights appearing blurry in the fine drops of rain falling by now. The temperature had dropped again and the warmth of the middle of day had now dissipated. Carlos waved at his friend and smiled. It was his day to close the café. Yair and Miguel were in the backroom cleaning and arranging the utensils needed for the next day. On the floor of the café there were still tables that needed picking up; half empty coffee cups their rims delicately lined with a pale brown line of coffee, the plates with leftover muffins, coffee cakes and croissants and crumpled paper serviettes. 

He walked onto the floor and started first to pick up the plates, piling them deftly on his hands and along his arm, then returning for the cups. Finally, he picked up the crumpled napkins and put them in a small garbage bag that he carried in one hand. As he cleaned the table closest to the young woman, she suddenly looked up from the book on her lap, her large black eyes focused on his arms as he quickly picked up the napkins and cleaned the surface of the table with a damp cloth.  When he looked at her, she was still looking at him. 

“Sorry about your coffee……” He caught himself saying, his words somehow having a life of their own.

“Huh……um…..” She managed to say as she quickly looked down onto her lap again, her gaze fixed on the sentences on the book.

“Your coffee fell to the ground, right?” He asked, stepping closer to her thinking she did not hear him the first time.

“Oh…. yea…. sorry I broke the cup.” She finally said, blushing as she spoke. That was when he noticed that her eyes in the light of the lamp above her seem to be filled with tears. And for a moment before he realized he was staring at her, he could not move his gaze from them. A sensation of being immersed and saturated; a kind of tunnel vision with her at the end of the light. And before he could realize, a line from a song he had heard growing up came to his mind. It was music his father had liked to listen and as a teenager he had dismissed it as a cheesy romantic song he wouldn’t dare listen to. 

Un minuto me basta vida para enamorate- one minute is enough my love, to fall in love. 

He shook his head once as he tried to brush off the sensation of déjà vu. 

“I’d like to pay for the cup.” She said.

“D-don’t worry about that.” Carlos said as he finally came out of his daze and managed to smile weakly. 

There was still more work to do before he could go home. The coffee and food stains on the floor, the muddy footsteps from those customers who had walking in after the rain and the relentless dust that permeates the air in the city and settles on everything, all needed cleaning before tomorrow morning. Yair was already mopping the floor on one side of the shop; his gaze falling on the young woman from time to time. 

 As Carlos walked back to the counter with the bag of crumpled napkins he had collected he wondered what time she would leave. Would she become a troublesome customer refusing to leave until they had to tell her that they were indeed closing for the evening? He shrugged his right shoulder absently as he started washing the stainless-steel jugs he used for frothing the milk, unware that his internal monologue was being played out on his body.  It would be awkward to tell her to leave, especially with those eyes, he thought to himself as he rinsed the utensils and placed them on a drying rack next to the small sink.

Before long, both Miguel and Yair were ready to leave, their faces showing signs of fatigue after a day of work. Carlos waved at them and walked into the backroom to pick up the keys to close the front door of the shop. He wrote his name and signed in the logbook and checked his watch to note the time. It was eight forty-five in the evening. There was another half an hour of walking before he would get home. He sighed audibly suddenly feeling older than his age. His wrist had hurt when he wrote his signature, his index finger almost cramping as he wrote quickly. He took off his apron and placed it on the chair and picked up his backpack from the floor where he had left it in the morning. It seemed to have lost its shape and size during the day, metamorphosing into a small scared animal crouching from its predator. As he put it on his back he realized that there was nothing much in it, the weight of the bag feeling unnaturally light. Over the years he had been careful not accrue too many possessions, resisting the temptation to buy things even when he had the money to afford them. Strangely, it was not that he was tight-fisted, but that it was a primal fear of becoming attached to objects and as he found out after his mother’s death, to people. Even when a young woman he knew showed an interest in him, he would walk away with only a twinge of regret that he knew would pass inevitably. While Diego would tease Carlos as female customers responded to his good looks, he would always brush them off as a minor annoyance in his life. There was simply no time for casual looks and dalliances.

He turned off the light in the back room and walked out through the narrow strip that allowed them to pass into the room from the counter. As he looked at the floor of the coffee shop he noticed that the young woman was still there, focused on the book that she was reading. He tutted, thinking that he would now have to ask her to leave. And as he walked towards her, Carlos accidently brushed against a chair and she looked at him, startled by the noise.

“Miss……I’m going to close up now.” He said.

“Oh…… of course. I didn’t realize the time.” She said hurriedly as she closed the book, placing the bill from the coffee she bought to mark the page. 

“It’s okay…… take your time.” He added seeing her rush. “No need to hurry.”

“Thank you.” 

“Um……… it’s raining again.” Carlos said walking through the space between the tables to the window. It would be cold outside and he was once again glad that he had already put on his sweater. 

“I didn’t even notice.” The woman said, rubbing her arm with her hand. “I didn’t even bring anything warm.” She picked up the backpack that she had kept on the chair on the other side of the table.

“Do you have to go far?” 

“Um……. not really. I’m actually waiting for my father to finish his work so we can go home together.”

“Oh……. does he work close by?” He smiled at her. She seemed more relaxed but there was still an expression of concern on her face. 

“Maybe you know him. He’s old fashioned, my father……… I’m not sure he would come here for coffee. He’s more of a coffee with milk kind of man.” She smiled. “He owns the homeopathy store……….”

“You mean, Senor Solano?” Carlos asked, a look of surprise on his face. “He once told me he has two daughters……. I just assumed they were ……”

“Older?” She said, smiling broadly.

“I didn’t mean to offend……. Of course, I know your father. I greet him every morning when I come to work.”

“He’s a hard worker, my father……. I don’t think he has taken a day off for himself in his life.” Her face had an expression of being lost in thought.

“He’s old school, isn’t he?” 

“Yes……but in a good way.”

He smiled, wondering if he had offended her with his remark.  

“But how come I’ve never seen you here before?” He asked eager to change the subject. 

“Oh……I usually don’t go home from work with my father.” She had begun sliding her arms through the straps of the backpack. 

“Why is that?” He blurted suddenly wanting to speak with her for longer. As she slid her arms through the backpack, her head lowered, her face was covered by her hair again. Carlos was overcome with an urge to tuck the shock of brown hair behind her ear, a gesture of intimacy that he would not have imagined about her before. 

“Well…….my father has been sick since a week or so……. I……my sister and I think he may have dementia. On Monday, he didn’t come home from work but instead went to an apartment that we used to live in when I was a child. Luckily the people now living in that place found my sisters phone number in his cell phone and she went to pick him up. We were so scared!” she said, her eyes wide. “But he insisted on coming to work the next day……. he can be stubborn sometimes. For him that store is his life’s work. So, today I decided to stay until he finished work so I could go home with him.”

“I didn’t know Senor Solano was ill……. If I had known.”

“That’s okay. I’m sorry that I stayed so long……and broke a cup. Are you sure I cannot pay for it?”

“Positive. And don’t worry about the time……this is usually the time we close up anyway.” He said lying. 

“Thank you. I should be going…….my father is probably closing up now.” She pushed the chair into the side of the table.

“What’s your name? I’m Carlos……” He said stretching his hand awkwardly. 

“I already know your name….” she chuckled and pointed at where his name tag had been before.

“Oh…….” He grinned.

“I’m Alexa.” She reached out and shook his hand, slowly but firmly. “That felt so formal.” She added laughing again, this time pushing her head back so her hair fell away from his face. Carlos could not help but watch her with rapt attention.

As they stepped out of the front door, a rush of cold wind mixed with needles of rain hit their faces. 

“Ayyyy!” She said as she waited for him to close the door and then pulling down the metal gate. He then locked the three points of contact between the gate and the floor with padlocks. 

“Sorry you have to wait….” He said as he crouched on the sidewalk.

“Nah…. no problem.” 

When they started walking towards the other end of the block where the homeopathy shop stood, the rain had intensified to fat drops that started to fall on their heads. Alexa instinctively wrapped her arms across her chest, the white shirt she wore proving little protection in the cold. He glanced quickly at her and wondered if he should offer his sweater but, then brushed the thought away as they got closer to the pharmacy. 

A halo of yellow light spilled out of the front windows and as they peeked inside Juan Manuel was closing the cash register. For a moment, the old man looked surprised to see his daughter walking into the store and then to see the young man from the cafe standing next to her. 

“You don’t need to take care of me, Alexa! That’s not your job.” Juan Manuel said, an expression of adoration on his face as he kissed his daughter’s forehead.

“I should get going……” Carlos said softly seeing the father and daughter talk. A sudden feeling of longing for his mother filling his thoughts. 

“No……wait. Let’s go together…….” Alexa said looking towards him, a look of entreaty crossing her face. He nodded his head in agreement and waited as Juan Manuel and his daughter closed the pharmacy for the day. 

Later, on his way home as he walked passed the shrine of Santa Muerte, he stopped in front of it. As Carlos stared into her empty eye sockets he remembered where he had heard the line from the song that he had recalled earlier. It was from a song by Juan Luis Guerra, a musician his father would listen to often when he felt nostalgic, the alcohol just enough to make him amiable.  Carlos remembered something more this time; a memory of his parents being happy together. His father grabbing his mother by the waist and dancing in the middle of the small living room, the look of love in her eyes, the smile that lit her face as she looked at him, their bodies swaying to the rhythm of the song, legs hitting the furniture and them not caring a second about it and finally, the kiss they shared as the song ended. There had been happiness between them; long before their hearts were broken by disappointment and disillusionment. They had been in love long before they had fallen out of it many times over before they finally gave up on each other. 

He remembered the smile on the young woman’s face as she said goodnight, and the sensation of something filling up his soul that had made him feel dizzy. What had that been?  He couldn’t tell. 

He sung the lines from the song under his breath and for a moment he imagined that the White Lady heard him.

 So here he was, singing to the Lady of Mictlan. So, finally this was to be his offering to her; this delicate opening of his heart and soul to someone else.

The War Souvenir

Waking up in the middle of the night, his lips dry and his throat parched, he wonders if it is the silence in the apartment that scares him more than the constant sounds of war. His mind always alert, was suspicious of the lack of sounds of distant violence: the dull thuds of mortars as they hit the dry earth and the silence that always follows as life extinguishes in its wake.

             The bedsheets under his palms feel warm. The fan whirring above him helps dissipate the thick air of the room and he can feel each muscle in his body tense and battle ready. He tries to control his breathing; picturing his lungs filling up with air as he breaths deeply and then emptying like a deflated beach ball as he exhales. And as he feels his breath slowing down and his heart that had been pacing like a wild animal in captivity calming down, an image flashes and then explodes in a deep corner of his half-awake mind. 

            Now, he has no control over the shivering that envelops his body like a wet blanket wrapping him ever so tightly in concentric circles as he feels the world around him going into a dizzying whirl. He scrambles to his feet and rushes to the bathroom. But before he reaches the toilet the contents of his stomach explode from his mouth; falling on his naked upper body, on the dirty clothes lying on the floor and on the white tiles of the bathroom. There’s nothing he can do to control the force of the spasms that keep wracking his body. The room is filled with the acrid smell of bile and semi-digested food. Weak, he now sits on the floor his head bent to the inside of the commode. He knows that the worst of it has passed.

             After a few minutes, he stands up and then walks to the sink and cups his hands under the tap to catch the water before he splashes it on his face. It feels cool against his skin and for a moment he indulges in this simple pleasure. As he sees his reflection on the mirror he notices the dark circles under his eyes, and the leathery look of his skin as it stretches over his cheek bones. The arrack he had drunk earlier in the evening had left him dehydrated and he knew that a headache would now follow in the wake of the vomiting. He splashed more water, this time over his thick curly hair, some of which started dripping down the sides of his temples. Looking at the floor of the bathroom he wondered what to do with the mess. As his body dry heaved one more time, he decided to wait awhile.

The living room of the small apartment was bathed in the blue light from the street lamp outside the window. Familiar objects seemed ghostly and intimidating as he started walking slowly to the small kitchen in one end of the room. He opened the fridge door and looked inside. It was empty except for four plastic bottles of Coca Cola and Fanta. That was the doing of his roommate who seemed to have a penchant for forgetting half-empty, fizzled out bottles of soda in the fridge. He had never bothered to complain since he spent time at the apartment so infrequently to complain about this odd habit. But now, he cursed under his breath as he felt his throat dry and papery. 

            Still no water. He opened a cupboard and took out a glass tumbler and filled it with water from the tap. As he drunk the water he realized how changed he had become from the man who had returned to Sri Lanka almost two years ago. His refusal during those first few months to drink water unless it was bottled now felt like the actions of an amateur. There had been looks from others around him as he insisted on gulping down from overpriced bottles of water in a country where most couldn’t afford the luxury. He had been stubborn, refusing to see his own impracticality. But then like many before him he had learned soon enough. 

               He recalled the feeling of rebellion as he acted against his parent’s wishes who had been blind-sided by their son’s decision. The sound of his own voice ringing true in his ears as he told his parents his plans to return to the country that they had left almost two decades ago. The look of frustration and fear in their aging faces that he chose to ignore as he explained to them his reasons for leaving his steady job. He had been completely confident in his own destiny.

             The glass still in his hand, he walked to the sofa and sat down suddenly feeling exhausted. His limbs felt numb as if he had been walking too long without rest. And in his stomach, he could feel a dull throbbing pain. In the blue shadows of the room he wondered if his mind was to blame more than the alcohol. There was a feeling that he was fighting a losing battle. Disillusionment seemed to have taken root unbeknownst to him somewhere deep in his psyche. What he had experienced in the war zone had chipped away each day at his naïve optimism. 

          He kept the glass on the table in front of him and let his body sink into the sofa, feeling the texture of the material rubbing against his exposed skin. He closed his eyes and breathed deeply. Maybe sleep would finally come to him and take possession of his overwrought senses. In the quiet, he heard a train passing on the tracks that ran behind the building. He remembers a memory from his childhood. Of waiting for the sound of the train to signify that everything was normal. The smell of the moldy cramped room that he had been told to hide in adding to his fear as he waited in the darkness. And just beyond the fragile safety of the walls, the sounds of men shouting angrily in the garden. He had bit into his forearm as he controlled his urge to scream for his parents. And all the while he had waited for the sound of the train, its familiar rhythm to serve as a sign that the horrors had been dissipated by the very magic of its banality. 

             His parents had left Sri Lanka a few months after Black July taking with them whatever money and possessions they could to build a new life.  The violence in the city had erupted so suddenly that it had taken a while for them to understand that they were being hunted like animals. By the time they had gone to a Sinhalese neighbor’s house to find refuge, the billowing thick black smoke from burning stores, houses and bodies had dominated the skyline. It was a week later that they emerged from hiding only to find that their house had been spared but that the family’s livelihood had been destroyed. The jewelry store that his father had taken pride in had been looted and consumed by fire. Instead of rebuilding their business his father had decided to do what many Sri Lankan Tamils had decided to do that year; join the exodus out of their homeland. Even as Kavi left behind everything familiar, the smell of the dark storeroom would become the only keepsake that he would carry with him for the rest of his life. And when he was finally too old to recall the details of what he had experienced, the ghosts of his trauma would remain with him like a hidden scar. A macabre memento from a distant past.

The next morning, he woke up to the noise of the fridge door shutting abruptly in the kitchen. He felt his body respond to the shock of the sudden sound, even though his mind felt muffled and cotton-woolly. Somewhere in the kitchen he could hear his roommate mutter to himself as he opened and closed the cupboards in what felt like an endless search. 

“Hey………Kavi! Do you know if we have any bread in the house?” Daniel yelled at him from the counter that separated the kitchen from the living room. 

“Huh?  I……. I don’t think so, man.” Kavi managed to say groggily.

“Shit!........I’m starving.” 

“Why don’t you go to the bakery close by……. I’m sure they will have bread.”

“Too lazy to do that man!” Daniel whined. 

             By now Daniel had walked towards the sofa, his skinny legs sticking out from underneath a pair of boxer shorts. He was wearing a polo t-shirt, the collar of which was frayed. The scraggly beard on his lean face gave him a look of being strung-out. Having grown up in Colombo, Daniel had taken it upon himself to introduce Kavi to all his favorite hangouts during the first few months of their acquaintance. At first, Kavi had been amused with his roommate’s enthusiasm but before long he had grown tired of the cavalcade of colleagues and friends that Daniel introduced him to each evening. And when he was finally assigned to the work at the government hospital in Jaffna, Kavi’s enthusiasm to start his work in the war-zone had taken Daniel by surprise.   

“Do you really want to go work in a hospital in Jaffna?” Daniel had asked in disbelief over a cold beer that he had been nursing in his hand as he held a cigarette with the other. They had been sitting across each other on plastic chairs in the small balcony of the apartment. 

“That’s what I came here for. I thought I’d be there already but there’s so much bloody red tape even if it’s to provide much needed help.”

“Geeze man, you sure are a saint.” Daniel rolled his eyes exaggeratedly as he looked at the railway tracks just beyond the wall of the apartment building. Protecting the tracks, a wall of giant granite boulders stood as the only barrier against the crashing waves of the Indian ocean. The air smelled of brine and dust. 

“I came here to do a job. The sooner I start the better.” Kavi had said matter-of-factly.

Daniel took a satisfying drag from the cigarette and let out a low Sheeeeesh from between his lips.

“I know plenty of buggers who come here for humanitarian purposes and decide instead to have a good time……… enjoy the warm weather and the cheap booze.” Kavi was unsure if his roommate was displeased that he had indeed turned out be one of those buggers who kept his promise. His interactions with Daniel always left him feeling a little unsure about the moral compass of the man with whom he shared an apartment. But then again who was he to judge.

“You look like crap.” Daniel said looking directly at his roommate now. Kavi’s deep set eyes looked hollow and dull and his cheekbones stood out underneath his sun-burnt skin. 

“I know……bad food.” Kavi said as he shrugged his shoulders and tried to stand up. It was an easier explanation than the truth of what had happened to him in the night. Immediately, he felt dizzy, his body struggling to support its own weight. He wondered if his roommate believed in ghosts. The ones that did not make spooky sounds like in the movies but stood at the periphery of one’s everyday life. Their silent unmoving stare directed at your very soul. The ones that did not jump-scare you when you least expected. Ghosts with glowing brown skin and almond eyes that made one want to see the bottom of a bottle of arrack like a melodramatic hero in an old Bollywood movie.

That kind of ghost.

“Maybe you should see a doctor…….” Daniel said absently swatting a fly that had settled on his arm.

“I’m okay…….” Kavi waved his hand to dismiss the suggestion. 

“Oh I forgot, you are a doctor.” 

 Kavi smiled weakly. 

“Don’t you have family in Colombo? What if something happens to you?”

“My parents will be notified.”

Daniel nodded his head satisfied with Kavi’s answer. 

“Well now that you are up, do you want to join me to get something to eat?”

Kavi nodded his head to say yes.

It had been only two weeks since Kavi had returned to Colombo when the images of the terrorist leader’s body had begun to flood mobile phones and TV screens. Kavi had been sent back with one of the last convoys of injured civilians sent by boat as the army closed in forcing the terrorists and their civilian hostages into the narrow strip of land between the waters of the Jaffna lagoon. He remembers the smell of the sea spray that had hit his face from time to time as the boat cut through the choppy waves once they had left the lagoon. 

           The photo of the dead man. The fleshy brown mustachioed face, now pallid and waxy seemed oddly out of place lying amidst a patch of brown mud. Dull and boring, bereft of the terror and loyalty he had commanded while alive. Just another body among many other’s in a battlefield that had been littered by both combatants and civilians. Each connected by fate to that one moment in time. The dead man’s uniform had been miraculously untouched, the serial number “001” clearly visible on a card clipped to his chest. 

        “The bastard’s finally dead.” Someone said in English as Kavi studied the image on his phone. Kavi had turned around to see who it was only to be met by the dead-stare of a middle-aged man. Kavi had smiled awkwardly and turned back to his phone. But soon enough there was the sound of firecrackers being lit in different parts of the city. There was a celebration of sorts. The war had ended.  But Kavi felt a shudder run through his body like a quick-silver snake. The ending of war was not the beginning of peace. It was simply a lull in the movement of the multitude of cogs in a tireless machine.             

           Kavi had lasted longer than others in the war zone. He had somehow managed to not break down each night after a day of treating toddlers with wounds pockmarking their young faces, their eyes glazed, while flies swarmed around them. He had managed to not stare into empty space after days of reassuring grandmothers holding the malnourished bodies of orphaned grandchildren in their laps. The children far too young to have watched their parents being killed by a shell that had fallen next to where they slept the night before. Many like him had returned from the war zone physically intact but mentally marked; their gaping wounds visible only to a practiced eye. 

           What he had not realized was that he had returned from the war zone with a ghost in tow. His own souvenir of the war. While others returned with spent bullets, photos or terrorist propaganda posters, Kavi had returned with a memory of a love and heartbreak that had been fleeting. A mere blink of an eye.                                                                          

            For Kavi, it would always be the teenage girl who died in his arms, her face decorated with an intricate pattern of shrapnel wounds as the shell exploded next to where she had laid down to sleep for the night. He would always remember her smile, the dimples forming at the corners of her mouth when had she bid him goodnight only a few hours before. He had helped the girl and her grandmother make a crude stove and light a fire that produced the dancing light that fell on her face as she watched him closely. Even after he had returned to Colombo her face had haunted him as he drank beer from a thick frosted glass in the backyard of a colleague’s house. There was talk of the civilians caught in the cage; a vice grip between the terrorists desperate for a trump card and the military intent on winning the war. There was nothing that could make him forget her. Padma; her beautiful dark brown skin and black hair, almond shaped eyes and youth had made her stand out immediately among the sea of faces that evening.

              As Kavi chatted with her grandmother he found that they were the only remaining members of Padma’s family. Her parents had died over the years as they moved from temporary shelter to yet another as the fighting between the army and the Tamil Tiger terrorists forced them to flee in search of safety.  Padma had said that she no longer remembered what her home had looked like in the small village outside of Jaffna town. And all that remained were the stories told by her grandmother. 

              Her parents had both been school teachers. And even though her parents had pleaded with the Tiger cadres who had come to their home one morning to spare her brothers, there had been no mercy. Only the blunt end of a rifle butt as they were beaten while their children were pushed into the back of a lorry. Padma had only been spared because she had been a toddler; her legs still chubby and traces of her infancy on her round cheeks. Her brothers who had been ten and eleven years old were deemed strong enough to carry a rifle and kill. They were never heard of again. Their childhood stolen from them that morning and their parents left with the void of their lost children and the inferno of their guilt.

                Padma, had come under her grandmother’s care when her parents died. First, her father had been gunned down by an LTTE carder as he tried to help another man who had been brutally beaten for talking back. And then her mother had been killed by a shell that had exploded next to her as she walked to the Red Cross medical tent in the refugee camp. Her reaction not fast enough to escape from the flying shrapnel that cut through her internal organs, leaving her face frozen in a permanent expression of surprise. 

              Kavi remembers the look on Padma’s young face as she listened to her grandmother retell their story. The furrows on her forehead as she controlled the tears welling in her eyes and the look of age-old pain in her eyes. He had not been able to suppress the waves of guilt that had risen as he listened silently. His own life as a young boy uprooted and then forced to grow up in a foreign land seemed a life of privilege in comparison to the trials of Padma’s life. 

Overnight Kavi and his younger sister were transplanted in a new country among people who looked and spoke nothing like them. And for the first time in their lives they had experienced what it meant to be alien, what it meant to have the wrong kind of skin color and speak English with the wrong accent, what it meant to not know how to eat with a fork and knife the right way or what it meant to not know that you needed to dress up for Halloween.

              At first they had lived in other people’s houses; relatives and friends who opened their homes to them. They suffered the indignities of being permanent guests in someone else’s house. Of being the poor migrants who had just arrived in America, and of being those who had to be taught how-to. When his parents were finally able to afford their own apartment, to find jobs to afford the rent, food and clothes it had been almost three years. After a few more years Kavi could no longer recognize the young boy who stared back at him from old photographs. Instead of the wide-eyed wonder of the boy biting into his first slice of apple pie, the eyes of the teenager that looked back at him in the mirror had become jaded. It was the worldly look of someone who had experienced rejection and loneliness. 

                Growing up he had been determined to erase any signs of being a foreigner; a deep shame overcoming him every time he was forced to talk about his childhood in a country that was fading from his memory. While his parents seemed determined to preserve all that remained of the life they had left behind, Kavi and his sister Sonia refused everything that resembled that very life. And when they met other families like them, their stories identical as they retold each painful detail. The looks of sadness and loss the same as theirs during those first few years of leaving Sri Lanka. His parents would embrace those new-comers to exile, opening their home to little-known countrymen. Kavi remembers feeling ashamed for those families as they gazed wide-eyed at the sprawling strip malls and the abundance of American supermarkets. The role-reversal somehow making him feel even more uncomfortable with the knowledge that despite his fashionable sneakers, his clothes and his cultivated taste in music he would always be only a degree away from being just-another-immigrant.

 That night as he watched the families gathered in the field; huddling around their fires, their belongings close to them; Kavi knew that the void he had felt was that of the loss of home. Strangely enough not the home he grew up in but the home where he had left a tiny yet significant part of his self behind as his family joined the exodus of Tamils. He also realized that Padma, her grandmother and all those who found shelter on that field, were also that part of him that he had lost so long ago.  They were the home that he had been looking for most of his youth.

With that thought he had entered the bunker; hardly more comfortable than the open ground yet several degrees safer from flying shrapnel in the event of a shell blast, and settled in for the night. As he dozed he thought about his parents, imagining them the way they had looked in old photos from before they had metamorphosed into successful immigrants. There had been a look in their eyes that seemed to say that they belonged, that had transformed over the years in the faded colors of those same photos into a deep regret. 

             But before he could barely begin to dream artillery fire had ripped through the night air, the familiar shrill whistle of the incoming shells like a harbinger of death. And as the shells impacted and the ground and the coconut tree trunks of the bunker shook, the screams of the people who were injured and those who were scrambling for safety mixed in with the shrill whistles of even more shells that rained on the field. 

             His first instinct was to scramble out of the shelter to help those who he knew would be seriously injured, their wounds proving fatal to them if not attended to immediately. But as he crouched towards the entrance someone grabbed him by the foot. It was the UN security officer, a former infantry colonel from Pakistan. It was he who had suggested that they build a bunker with what material they could find. 

“You are no help to them dead!” Khan had screamed. “There’s nothing you can do but wait for the shelling to finish.”

“But those people are completely exposed in that field out there……there’s no shelter for them. We have to help!” Kavi said his words drowned by the sound of yet another shell impacting the ground.

“No! You need to stay. You need to be alive……. there’s more people who need your help.”

“But this was supposed to be a no-fire-zone……these people thought they were safe and they could rest for the night.” Kavi screamed in frustration beating his fists onto the earthen wall of the bunker they had dug earlier in the day. 

“Its war, Kavi.” The colonel’s tone was of grim resignation.

“Whoever is sending those shells are killing innocent civilians……. whether it’s by mistake or not, its fucking murder!” Kavi said feeling the muscles in his jaw hurt as he controlled his anger.

            Impotent, Kavi waited for the first signs that the shelling had ended. And before anyone could stop him again, he quickly crouched out of the bunker to the open field. In the east, there were slithers of crimson clouds. It was close to dawn and yet the air smelled of smoke and burning flesh. The field that a few hours before had been filled with families preparing a simple meal for the night; chatting among themselves, rocking their children to sleep and finally settling down to a night of respite from their troubles was now a burning, smoldering hell-scape. Everywhere he looked were the dead, the dying and the injured. There were moans and sudden screams of those who had been wounded, and mingling with them there was the continuous laments of those who had survived. 

                By now the rest of the team of the Red Cross officers had also emerged from the bunker, their faces dazed as they wondered where to start. After a few minutes of walking, Kavi realized that he was stepping on bodies that had scattered throughout the field; a mutilated arm, a dismembered leg. Blood and shrapnel dotted the three jeeps that had been parked next to the bunker. As he looked at the single wood-apple tree that had stood in the field marking the spot where Padma and her grandmother had camped for the night, he saw what at first glance was a child’s plastic doll. But as he gingerly stepped closer he saw that it was the corpse of an infant, her body thrown up into the branch of the tree from the force of the blast. He dry-heaved uncontrollably. 

              It was then that he saw Padma; barely alive. She was moaning in pain. As he ran to her side he quickly assessed her condition; there was nothing left to do as she bled to death from her misshapen limbs. Her grandmother lay next to her, eyes closed, a look of peace on her wrinkled face. Kavi sat next to Padma and held her head on his lap as she looked at him with eyes dazed from pain. What had been her clear young face was littered with shrapnel wounds forming a grotesque death-mask. Her breathing was shrill as she struggled to catch her breath, her face ashen from the blood draining from it as her heart fought to keep her alive, and spasms racked her body as it slowly gave up. 

             As he held her head tenderly, for a moment he thought that she recognized him as a weak smile spread across her face. Controlling his own rush of emotions, he smiled back at her.

“Padma, you are going to be okay……. rest now.” He said in halting Tamil, his voice soft and kind. But as the next spasm tormented her weakened body, he knew she would die. As she drew her last breath he wondered what sins he had committed to possess that knowledge. To know that her life would ebb away to nothingness. That she would die without the knowledge of peace nor a glimpse into a different future. 

Dreaming of Monsters and Friends

Part I

I think it’s been a long time since I had a dream. You work so long and you are so tired that nothing comes up when you finally fall asleep. It’s like a long stretch of void between the time you fall asleep and the time you wake up. And even when you are awake, you feel like you are an automaton. You work, you do the things that you are supposed to but you are still asleep with your eyes wide open.

 I remember that I used to dream a lot as a kid. It was as if all my brain did back then was dream. There was one that I remember well.  I was the Lone Ranger and I would catch the bad guys in the nick of time and then ride into the sunset like in the films. And there was always a beautiful brunette by my side. I wanted to marry someone like that back then. 

But then, I grew up. 

There is a little boy in the building where I live. He reminds me of myself as a kid. Scraggly hair, a ready grin almost as if he is trying too hard to please and that unmistakable look of loneliness. On most days, his parents work late and he stays alone in the apartment. I see him sometimes sitting on the staircase, close to the front door of the building. Waiting. And whenever he greets me I don’t seem to be able to respond. That simple attempt at a connection takes me by surprise each time. Tongue tied I wave at him and then feel guilty. I know he’s just a lonely kid trying to make a friend. 

I bet he dreams a lot. I bet he dreams every night. Nightmares that make your heart race uncontrollably. And the good dreams that makes your soul feel wightless like candy floss. 

I bet he dreams about brunettes with beautiful café-con-leche skin too. 

Maybe if I ask him what he dreams about, they will in turn become my own dreams like a secret being passed on from one to another. I can’t help but be greedy for dreams when all of mine have been extinguished so long ago.

I bet he dreams a lot. 

Lucky kid!

                                                                               ****                                                                                   

There’s one dream that always pops up in my head when I try go to bed. It goes something like this: I’m on the sidewalk outside my building, it’s almost dusk and the air around me feels cold. And then suddenly the ground beneath me starts to move. The concrete sidewalk turns into what feels like Jell-O and giant waves undulate making me lose my balance. And then, I start to shake in fear because my city is going to be destroyed. 

I haven’t told my mother about my dream. She would only become worried about me and say under her breath how much she hates her job. I know she feels guilty because she cannot take care of me after school. I sometimes listen to my parents talk in the night when they think I’m asleep. So, I know these things.

In the afternoons, when its only me in the apartment, I spend time staring at the snake-like crack that runs across the wall that is next to my bed. It grows each day like it has a life of its own. The zig-zag of the crack getting darker and wider each day. It’s so big now that my mother noticed it too. I could see concern in her face. 

We live in an old building. From the outside, it looks like it was built so long ago that it’s a miracle it has survived the constant rumblings that shake the city. The façade was painted a bright maroon two years ago but the battering during the rainy season and the grime off the streets has taken its toll. It looked just as sad as it used to before the coat of paint. And now the building stands next to a shiny new apartment building; its façade a sanitized steely grey, its windows cleaned each week, its balconies filled with outdoor chairs and neat potted plants. 

No, I don’t wish that I lived in an apartment like that.

I like my building. 

Sometimes I imagine it wants a friend too. And maybe I could be that friend. Someone consistent, who doesn’t let it down. My mother says that to my father sometimes. Those are the nights when she cries in the bathroom. You can hear everything in our little apartment. Everything is so close to each other: the living room to the kitchen, the kitchen to the tiny laundry room, the bedroom to the living room. We live in a small box that contains other small boxes within it. Like those Russian nesting dolls.  One within the other, constantly connected. Nesting. 

I walk home from school. It’s not that far. A few blocks to the south from where I live. When I walk home I like to think about these things. Of Matryoshka dolls. How we are just like that. Living so close to each other. And I think how come no one else seems to see it that way. 

Everyone is searching for space in this city. 

Somedays I wish I had my own space. Just mine.

Some of my class mates refuse to speak to me or play with me during recess. They called me “weirdo” one day. Maybe it’s because I like to think a lot. Maybe it’s because I don’t talk to them about the new toy that my parents bought for me or the cartoon that I watched on TV. Then I remember what my mother says to me. She says: Don’t you mind the silly talk of children. They don’t know anything about life. You are perfectly fine as you are.And then she’d kiss me on the crown of my head tenderly. 

                                                                             ****                    

Raul, the man I work with most of the time thinks I’m too old for the job and likes to call me grandpa.“ Abuelo…. que onda?”  He would holler at me from the other end of the parking lot as he walked to the cramped security post at the exit. I always worked from the post at the entrance. A crude square box with Plexiglas windows that makes me think of a coffin.  At first Raul used to get under my skin and irritate me. His lack of respect. But then I realized it was nothing personal. And now I don’t mind that he calls me grandpa. 

Lately, I’ve been seeing ghosts in the mirror. I wonder if my time is up. Usually, the afternoon sun manages to creep through the narrow slit of window in the bathroom and cast shadows where none should be, playing tricks on me. They make me think that I too belong among the ghosts of my past. Somewhere in the twilight of the bathroom, the shadows metamorphose into faces of those long gone. 

On most days when I walk out of the building there’s a feeling of being disconnected from the natural flow of life. By late afternoon, for most people the day has already begun to wind down. The small children’s park, sandwiched between two forks of the street that leads to the street where I catch the metro-bus is always full of children and young mothers. Watching them I wonder if my mother ever played with me in that attentive, caring manner. She was a woman of little words and little affection. Growing up I thought that was how things were supposed to be. That chilly feeling between her and I every time we were alone. Maybe that’s why I couldn’t bare the loss of my father when he finally passed away. He always had a tune on his lips and a joke for me. Despite his efforts, I ended up resembling my mother. Juana with her sharp features and pursed lips, dressed in her clean modest clothes looked unhappy next to her effervescent husband in faded family photos. What she was unhappy about I never knew. When she died, I felt guilty for the relief I felt at finally being alone.

Sometimes, I miss my father. It feels strange to miss him when I think that I could easily be mistaken for someone’s grandfather. There’s more grey hair than black in my head now, my skin hangs a little slack around my jaws and neck and my gait is starting to get that slow shuffle of the elderly. He died a year shy of turning forty, not a single grey hair visible on his head. Aging baffles me. This slow decay of my body and my senses.

I finally find some space in the crowded metro-bus; stuck between two women talking enthusiastically about their grandchildren. Their talk is cheerful. One of them is dressed fashionably, her face caked with make-up and the other is dressed in a pair of jeans and a sweater that suit her well. They could be my age. Looking out the window at the passing buildings and traffic I suddenly feel weary. 

There would be no one to bury me when I die.

                                                                                ****

Don Rodrigo waved at me today as he walked out the building to go to work. He’s an odd sort, I’ve heard my parents say. But I think there’s a chance that he might be someone just like me. 

Last night I had a nightmare again. It’s the same dream. The undulating waves of the asphalt, and me falling on the ground. But this time there was a sound. A rumbling so loud and clear emanating from deep below the earth. I woke up in the morning feeling exhausted. When I dressed standing in front of the mirror, I wondered if there was a way to escape from a dream. The light outside the tiny window of the bathroom looked grey and foggy. And on my walk to the school, the wind blew chilly and sharp at my sides, my lungs feeling heavy as I took each breath. The air smelled acrid and stung my nostrils. 

But it ended up being a good day at school. During recess, I sat down and drew the skyline of the city, making sure to include all the tall buildings that I knew.  No one bothered me in my little corner of the playground. They were completely oblivious to my presence. I looked up and watched the kids running, pushing and jumping around me. It looked like a battle of sorts; each trying to carve out a space for themselves in a place where there was so little of it.

Back home in the afternoon I ate the food my mother had made for me that morning. Chicken and rice to be eaten with tortillas that she had bought from the shop around the corner. There was always a line for tortillas there. On the weekends, it was my chore to be in the line. The smell of the fresh corn dough and the noise of the machine that made the tortillas never failed to fascinate me. Somedays the line would stretch to the end of the block. 

There’s always a line for anything in this city. 

But my mother likes those tortillas and so I wait patiently. Sometimes I see Don Rodrigo in the line too. That makes me happy since I like to imagine that he is my friend.

Part II

I don’t believe in monsters but then I also believe in them especially just before I fall asleep. I imagine the crack in the wall next to my bed widening into a chasm that swallows me whole like the maw of some giant monster. My mother calls these things my silly notions. She blames the TV for my nightmares.  She thinks I watch TV in the afternoons when I’m alone at home. I don’t tell her about the books I read instead. The books about gods and the people who lived long before this city existed and long before us. 

“Why don’t you find some normal books to read? Comics- Superman, Spiderman…….” She sighs as she rummages through my collection of books. Most of them are mine, bought from the second-hand store next to my school. The rest are from the school library.

She then caresses my forehead tenderly, her gaze intently focused on my face as if she is trying to read something on it. Her hands feel soft on my skin and I smell the last traces of her perfume. I feel that familiar heaviness in my heart. It’s love and concern for her. There’s tears in her eyes. She feels the same heaviness too. 

“Mi amor….” She says and takes a deep breath. I see her controlling her tears. 

“I’m okay, Mami.” 

She nods her head and attempts a smile.  Right then I hug her, feeling my arms wrap around her neck and feel the warmth of her cheek.

“I want the best for you my kiddo……but then sometimes I can’t help but worry. You are so grown up I can barely recognize you sometimes.”

“Soon, you won’t have to worry about me at all.” I say calmly. She then kisses me on the cheek and places her nose on my skin and inhales deeply. 

                                                                           ****

Today, I finally said hello to Don Rodrigo. He looked at me as if he had been hit in the face by someone. He missed a step as he walked down the rest of the staircase. And then he stopped and said hello to me. 

“What kind of job do you do?” I asked him before he stepped outside.

“Oh……. I’m a security guard.”

I nodded my head slowly the way I’ve seen my father do sometimes. I wanted Don Roderigo to know that I was giving that information careful consideration. 

“That’s good.” I said finally as he opened the lock of the small door to the street. And with the door ajar he turned towards me and spoke again.

“Are you alone in the afternoons?” 

“I’m nine and I can take care of myself.” 

“Of course.” He said and closed the door behind him carefully. 

That was the most I’ve heard him speak. Just then, I was sure that I liked him.

Maybe, I could tell him about my dream.

                                                                           ****

I listened to Raul talk about a young woman he had met a few days ago. He described her appearance in detail taking time to tell me that he had wanted to sleep with her right away. 

“But she’s the type you got to woo into bed with a nice meal, a movie, a walk in the park……maybe some ice cream, which ever she pleases.”  There had been a glint in Raul’s eyes when he talked about the woman. An energy that made me feel old the way young people inevitably make the elderly feel.

“So will you date her, then? Woo her?” 

“I think she’s worth it…… just that body is worth the effort.” Raul said earnestly. It seemed that he had given his plan some thought. 

“And then what would you do?”

“Well……” Raul shrugged to say that he had no plans.

“Marriage?”

Raul looked at me with a look of pity. An expression that seemed to say; the old man’s one of those poor romantics. Maybe that’s why he never married. 

“What marriage? She’s not the type I’d take home. My mother will clobber me over the head.”

I nodded my head in agreement. My mother had never approved any of the girls that I had eyed as a teenager. Even when I was an adult each time she had caught me looking at a young woman with interest, she would glare at me with such force that I would immediately look away from the woman. You see, my father had left my mother for another woman just after my tenth birthday and I think since then she had wanted nothing to do with men. Sometimes I wondered if the irony of having to raise a man had made her bitter towards me despite her maternal feelings. 

It was confusing to be loved that way. There was always a hint of anger in her gestures of love. As I grew up that love turned into possessiveness as she realized that she was utterly alone. She wanted me to herself and I was too naïve to realize what she was doing to me. 

By the time she died it was too late for me.Iwas the one who was now utterly alone.

“You have no one?” Raul asked egged on by his curiosity about me. Lately, he had taken to asking personal questions that left me feeling exhausted. 

“It’s just me.”

“You know it’s never too late to find someone.” Raul patted me on the shoulder condescendingly. I’ve learned to ignore his youthful arrogance. 

The long daylight hours of summer had begun to dissipate and it looked dark and gloomy already. 

I looked at my watch. It was time for me to start work. I waved a quick goodbye to Raul and started walking to my post.

Part III

I barely heard the siren go off the first time that day. It sounded foggy in my sleep addled brain.  I knew it was for the drill to mark the anniversary of the earthquake of 1985. I barely remembered things from back then. What I knew were the stories that my mother had retold over the years of the destruction and the loss.

And then I had a dream. It had been so long since I had a dream. 

I think I had become greedy for one.

It was me but younger. I was standing on the sidewalk outside the building where I lived. Then out of the blue a rumbling sound like a train coming towards me rose from the ground. Something powerful and primal was awake. And the Jacaranda tree across the street; its branches full of green leaves started to shake making a noise like falling rain. As I stood transfixed, the ground beneath me gave way and I fell into a dark chasm. 

I woke up terrified in my bed. My forehead covered in sweat. As I stood up, I felt the urge to piss. I shuffled to the bathroom, my heart still pounding in my chest. The light inside was too bright for it to be time for me to prepare for work. I glanced quickly at the watch. 

It was twelve thirty in the afternoon.

My stomach felt empty. I opened the fridge to find a tortasitting in a plastic bag from this morning. I had bought it from the seller close to work. There had been the usual line of customers waiting patiently for their breakfast sandwich. Some of the faces were familiar. Regulars like me. A few of them nodded a greeting as I joined the line. 

I pulled the tortaout from the plastic bag and began to eat it. It was cold but still tasted good. I couldn’t bother to heat it up. 

The dream had started to fade away from my mind by then. Only the image of the jacaranda tree and the rumbling noise was left as I sat down in front of the TV. 

                                                                             ****

My mother said it was okay to stay home today. My stomach had ached all night and then in the morning I had thrown up the slice of bread that my mother had served me.

She was worried that I would be alone at home all day. 

“It’s okay, Mami.” I said.

“It’s just that I can’t take a day off kiddo. There’s so much work piled up.” She stroked my hair tenderly. “I will try to come home early, okay? If something happens knock on Tia Lucia’s door and she will take you to the doctor if need be.” 

I nodded my head even though I didn’t like Tia Lucia and the smell of her apartment. It was a heavy mix of condiments and the wet-dog smell of her poodle whose matted brown fur seemed never to have been groomed.  She lived in the same floor as Don Rodrigo and would sometimes check on me in the afternoons. A short stout woman, she always asked too many questions and demanded answers even thought I didn’t want to share my thoughts with her. I felt she wanted a friend too but I wasn’t sure that I liked her that much. 

And when the siren went off I looked out the living room window calmly. Most people were still walking on the street. A block from where I lived, there was a group of office workers standing on the street outside the new building that had been completed only a few months ago. They looked relaxed; chatting, taking photos or staring at their cell phones. I walked back to the couch and continued to watch the TV show about African dung beetles. While I sat there my stomach rumbled faintly and I wondered if the worst of it was over.

Part IV

When I woke up, I remembered falling asleep on my bed and then the loud rumbling of some terrible monster waking from its slumber. And then a feeling of weightlessness followed by oblivion. There was a faint memory of a siren; the blare urgent and stabbing at my ear drums. 

I woke up sandwiched between a slab of concrete and my bed. The crack on the wall had finally consumed me as I had imagined. But I was miraculously still alive. 

“Help me.” My voice sounded disconnected as I uttered those words repeatedly. I felt light headed and somewhere below my waist I could feel a slow draining. I moved my left leg but my right was stuck. I felt a wooly void where my right leg should have been. That’s when I screamed. An incoherent wordless scream. 

                                                                               ****

I heard the boy. I knew it was him. He was scared and probably injured. 

“I’m here.” I shouted and instinctively tried to raise my hand to wave. Immediately, the pain that shot through it made me feel light-headed. 

“Fuuuck!” I screamed too. Then, I think I lost consciousness for a few minutes only to wake, this time to the sound of my name.

“Don Rodrigo!” It was the boy again. I wanted to respond by saying his name but realized that I didn’t even know that.

“Hijo! Kid!”

“I’m hurt” He was scared, I could tell.

“Don’t worry. Someone will come to help us.”

There was silence from the kid. I started to panic again. 

“Let’s keep talking until help arrives.”  I said running out of ideas.

“Okay.” He said faintly.

Looking around I could see that I was still in my living room but the space between the floor and the ceiling had been reduced to only a couple of feet. The floor beneath my body was dangerously slanted. I understood what had happened. The force of the quake had made the floors of the building collapse on each other like neat crumpled layers of a cake. The boy and I were stuck between these layers like the icing. In the silence between the questions and responses, there was nothing except for the sounds of sirens and the buzzing of helicopters overhead. 

When the earthquake siren sounded the second time, I knew there was not enough time for me to climb down the stairs so I crawled underneath the dining table in the living room and decided to wait out the shaking. The rumbling sound had been the worst just before I felt my body being thrown into the air. And then I blacked out. 

“Where are your parents kid?”

“Work.”

“How come you are not at school?”

“Don Rodrigo…….” The boy sounded like he was about to cry. “I had a dream of a monster swallowing me up.”

“I had my first dream in years this morning.” I said trying to change the subject. “It was a good dream.” I lied deliberately.

“What was it about?” The kid responded after a few minutes of silence.

“A carnival. I was on a carousel…… on a pony going up and down.” 

“I like carousels……. I wish my parents could take me to places like that more often.” 

“I’m sure they want to.”  

“Don Rodrigo………Do you think people can be in the same dream?” I’m lost for words.

                                                                                 ****

I’m glad that I’m not alone. I could never tell my parents but I hate being alone so much. And now as I look up at the patch of sky above me I wonder if this is what it always looks like. White clouds that seem like they’ve been shredded by hand, floating in a grey-blue sky. The color makes me feel sad. 

I haven’t heard from Don Rodrigo for a while now. There’s people talking in the street and the steady pulse of a police siren. And then the voice of a man calling out. 

“I’m here.” I yell, my throat hurting from the effort. I feel parched and my tongue is coated in dust.

 There’s footsteps approaching now. I feel hopeful and shout for help again.

“Don’t worry…. you are going to be fine.” A man says touching my forehead gently.

“There’s another person…. Don Roderigo………. He lives alone.” 

“Huh?” The man looks puzzled.

“Don Rodrigo! Find him!” I yell feeling desperate, on the verge of tears.

                                                                            ****

I think for a few minutes before I answer the boy’s question. And run my tongue over my parched lips.

“Hey kid,……. don’t you stop dreaming.” I say instead of agreeing with him. 

I feel a sharp pain in my chest. A calculated stab at my heart. 

I want to tell him that no one cares about the dreams of the poor and insignificant. That our dreams are not worth much to anyone else but us. 

“Kid……. are you there?” I yell again. 

“Here!” I hear him say. “I think this is a dream and we are somehow dreaming it together.” 

“Yes, ……we are.” I managed to say as the pain in my chest begins to dull my senses.

“Don Rodrigo, would you be my friend?” I hear the boy say as if he is talking to me through a veil over his mouth. I no longer have strength to move my mouth so, I nod my head to say yes. 

Yes, I could be your friend.

When The Jacaranda Blooms

The first time I slept with him it had felt almost like love. He was an attractive man; his body tall and lean, the strands of grey in his hair the only reminder that he was almost twice my age. Just before he touched my lips with his index finger with the agility of a well-practiced lover, I could feel my body physically aroused by the anticipation of his touch. There was that familiar warmth in my loins, and I knew that my body was receptive. He had been careful not to rush. It was our fourth “date” and until then it had mostly been the two of us spending the afternoon in a hotel room, talking over coffee or enjoying a meal. By then I had lulled myself into believing that I was falling in love with him. That he was not simply seeing me as an object of lust.    

        So, when he finally kissed me that day, I found myself responding to him, my hands slowly moving to the nape of his neck, my body rising a little to meet his. When he touched my body, tracing his fingers deftly to my breasts, my nipples were already hard. By then I knew that the love-making would be good. That it would not horrify my soul as much as I had anticipated. And when he stood up from the bed he looked at me and smiled. Not the smile of a conqueror as I had expected but that of a lover. That smile puzzled me as I watched him dress; carefully putting on the shirt he had been wearing so as not to crease it more, and the pants that he had placed neatly on the armchair close to the window that faced Paseo de la Reforma. By then I had dressed too, and was standing next to the window; the view of the boulevard down below in the corner of my eye. Once he was ready, he walked up to me and kissed me on the mouth; taking time to enjoy the kiss. By then, I had already begun to feel that deep sense of guilt that would accompany each time we made love since that day. I stayed in the room another hour or so; taking a shower, drying my hair and dressing in the same clothes again. Something stopped me from staying naked while he dressed even though it would have spared me the trouble of getting dressed twice. I guess, I didn’t want to allow him the luxury of seeing me naked other than while we were making-love.

        It’s been almost two years since the first afternoon that I had allowed him to touch my body. By now, I had expected our love-making to have fizzled out and for him to have lost interest in meeting me. 

       “You are the only other woman I sleep with other than my wife.” He told me once. The mention of his wife making me cringe a little. It was a breaking of rules; to talk about our personal lives, other people we were seeing. I smiled and continued to watch him dress from my vantage point at the large window. But the thought haunted me for weeks after that day. Why had he told me that information? I knew he had a wife, possibly children but I preferred not to care. It would do me no good to know about his other life. The one that he would be proud to display openly. The next time I met him, I punched him in the shoulder as I straddled him. Wincing in pain, he looked at me like a child who had been spanked for no apparent reason. 

“What was that about?” He asked me, his voice hoarse.

“That was for being a jerk.” I said cryptically as I slowly started to move my hips rhythmically. By then he was already holding me by my hips. A trace of puzzlement left on his face.

      There had been only a few exceptions to our meetings. After we met, the entire week would pass without even a word from him unless there was a reason for him to write to me. And I in turn, could forget that he existed. In in a city this big it was not difficult to become self-involved. I had my work, the occasional meet-up with friends in the evening, and the weekend visit to see my parents. The week went by like this until the next Thursday when I would check my phone messages to see if there was a change in plans. 

       But on Thursdays, by mid-morning something within me would begin to build up. It was palpable. I would get impatient with the passage of time until midday, the usual traffic jams that barely registered in my mind during the rest of the week would annoy me, and the minute hands on my watch seemed to be in an eternal battle against me. I never bothered to name this feeling I would have each Thursday morning. I was not going to allow myself that kind of sentimentality.

After I parked my car in one of the shopping malls close to the hotel, I would walk from there, conscious of the looks that I received from other pedestrians. Growing up I never considered myself a beauty; my body and my face never seemed to conform to what was considered beautiful among boys I knew back then.  But the unwanted attention of men had always been something that I had had to contend with. I learned to not care. 

      The short walk from the shopping mall to the hotel, was all mine. I guarded it fiercely even from thoughts of him. The Paseo de la Reforma, with its constantly changing facades always fascinated me. It stood out among the other main arteries of the city; the wide boulevard always felt transplanted from elsewhere. It’s ability to transform itself was comforting. There was no judgement of my own transformation. From single woman to someone’s mistress. And when I finally get to the hotel room, swipe the card and wait for the “click” as the lock opens I know that my transformation is complete. For the next three hours, I’m his. And I never know if he is completely mine.

Six months ago, there was a break in our routine. It had all begun with our paths crossing by accident. A simple enough incursion of the one into the other’s life. It didn’t even last a full five minutes. But it changed something between us. We didn’t meet each other for the next two weeks and I was convinced that it was over between us. I continued with my everyday routine but somewhere in the back of my mind I could sense a rupture. I decided to ignore that nagging feeling. It was not like I was missing him.

But on the third Thursday morning a message from him woke me up. 

“I want to see you. Let’s meet at the usual time. Nothing’s changed.” 

I stared at my phone in the hazy blue of the morning seeping through the curtains. It was cold and I could feel a lump forming in my throat. I wasn’t sure how to respond. This could be the moment that I would finally break from our Thursday routine. Freedom for me from the guilt that I would feel each time. After a few minutes, I replied with a brief “okay”.

     When I walked into the hotel room that afternoon, for a moment I thought he looked relieved. Had he thought that I would not keep my promise? 

It was strange to have him caress my face gently, gazing into my eyes like he was finally able to see directly into my soul. It made me uncomfortable. He was showing something more than desire towards me.

“Is everything okay?” I asked desperate to change the mood in the room.

“Yes.” He said flatly, taking his hand from my face.

“That’s good.” 

“Imogen….” He said, his body turned away from me. I could not see the expression on his face but his voice sounded different. It was thick and devoid of the clear confidence that I was familiar with. Gooseflesh appeared on my arms, making the ends of my nerves sting with the sensation. And immediately, I remembered the first time I had met him in that hotel room. I had been nervous; struggling with my own conscience that day. He had smiled and pronounced my name the way only my father did. A clear “j” instead of the “h” that everyone used when saying my name. I had long ago given up correcting the pronunciation to anyone new. A running joke between my father and I; It was he who had named me after a young woman he had met as a student in London. A class mate he had been too shy to profess his love to with his English that stubbornly clung to the traces of his native Spanish. For two years, he had been in love with the young woman only to return to Mexico City to meet my mother who he had married promptly. 

I rubbed my arms instinctively to get rid of the gooseflesh, dispelling the memory from my thoughts.

“What is it?” I asked, dropping my bag to the floor next to me slowly. 

“I’m sorry.” His head was lowered and I could see the profile of his face. In the diffused grey light of the autumn afternoon, I thought he looked his age. The subtle crow’s feet spreading like a fan from the corner of his eye, the greys more prominent on his neatly combed hair.

“I don’t understand.”

He turned to me, his expression; distraught. 

“I didn’t know what to do. I panicked. My wife and son were next to me and all I could do was freeze. I know I could have at least smiled with you.” 

       I could feel my jaw tense. Yes, remembered how I had felt when he had ignored me. It had hurt my feelings. The hot tears that had trickled uncontrollably from my eyes had shamed me. And even with my best efforts, I hadn’t been able to control them. Once I was home I had rationalized everything that had happened. The look of cold avoidance in his gaze was part of the deal. But my own weakness at the sight of him with his family had taken me by surprise. The knowledge that our relationship was limited to the confines of a hotel room made me feel sick to my stomach. I was nothing more than a mistress. 

“I understand.” I said, my voice sounding like that of an automaton. 

“I didn’t know if I could meet you after that day. That’s why I cancelled our meeting.”

“Then why meet me today?” I said, feeling stung by his words.

He walked closer to me and tucked a strand of hair behind my ear. It was strange to see him this way. His emotions visible on his face, his hands shaking a little as he caressed my hair. 

“Because I realized that I couldn’t be without seeing you. That despite what I had told myself over and over again each time we met….” He paused and held me by the shoulders. 

“What did you tell yourself?” I could feel anger rising within me. It was strange that I had felt offended by what he had just said. This revelation of his own inner thoughts felt like a burden.

“That…. that you were….. a distraction. A temporary distraction that would go away. That my heart and my loyalty belonged only to my wife.”

I pushed his arms away and walked to the other end of the room. The need to distance myself from him and this revelation; urgent. He stood in the middle of the room, his arms still afloat in the air. 

“So, what’s changed since I saw you at the restaurant with your family, huh?” I asked, feeling my own voice break from the weight of my emotions.

For a few seconds, he looked at me in a daze, seemingly confused by my question.

“I……. I couldn’t believe how I felt when I saw you that day.”

“You mean you wanted to fuck me then and there!” I said feeling breathless as I controlled my anger. 

“No……I didn’t want to fuck you.” He looked offended.

“Then?” I stood in my corner of the room. The physical distance between us the only thing stopping me from slapping him.

“I…… I realized that I was in love with you.” He sighed as if a burden had just been released. 

His words took me by surprise and I sat on the floor, my legs giving in. Instinctively, I covered my face with my hands. Tears began to fall in between my fingers and down my face. Why had he done this? 

He sat on the floor next to me and embraced me. I could feel his arms around my body, and the steady rhythm of his breathing as he held me.

“I’m sorry.” He said again.

“Fuck you!” I said from behind my hands, a mix of anger and sadness rising like a wave in my mind.

“I deserve that.”

“You will never leave your wife or your family.”

“I …. I don’t know.” 

“Fuck you!” I said again. My heart pounding like a rabid animal in a cage. I wanted to beat him, to feel my fists hitting the flesh of his body. 

“I’ve fallen in love with you. I know I’m not supposed to even say that but….” he began.

That was when I punched him right in the face. The force of it making him fall flat on the carpet of the hotel room. 

“What are we going to do?” he said after a few minutes, as he slowly raised his torso from the floor. A bright red mark appearing on his left cheek.

It’s spring and the Jacaranda trees are in full bloom. As I walk to the hotel I step on delicate purple petals littering the sidewalk. Their beauty fleeting, just enough to make you hopeful. Only to then fall to the ground with the next rain, to be trampled and ground to nothingness. 

“This is my favorite season.” He tells me, looking out the window at the purple blooms down below. Turning towards me he smiles. I could see that he is happy to see me. 

“For you.” I say and hand him a flower that I had picked up on the way.

He chuckles and kisses me on the mouth. As I walk closer to him, I smell his aftershave; subtle and intoxicating at the same time. He embraces me tenderly; I feel the pressure of his arms around me. I feel safe. But I also feel trapped.

Since the day I punched him, our routine had changed. We now meet twice a week. Thursdays at midday and on Tuesdays in the evening. 

“I feel at peace with you.” He says to me. I nod my head silently. 

     When we make love afterwards I feel his body respond to me differently than before. His pleasure more intense, the release more enjoyable. Once we are done he spends more time with me before he starts to dress. Languid, he takes time to embrace my naked body. And I in turn have begun to let him see me naked as I sit in the arm chair while he dresses. He smiles as he watches me take him in with my eyes. 

“Turned on enough?” He asks.

“Hmmmmmm….” I say softly.

       When he is ready to leave, he kisses me on the forehead. He picks up the flower from the table next to the armchair and puts it inside his jacket pocket. 

I smile because my heart fills with tenderness for him. As I watch him close the door, I contend with that now familiar feeling; of feeling safe and of feeling trapped. 

Maybe there’s a way out from this routine for me. From the conflict of my emotions. The tug of familiarity, the comfort of his physical presence and the promise of a future. Equally strong; the burden of my conscience, the fear of judgement and the knowledge that I live in a borrowed dream. 

       As I pick up my clothes from the floor near the arm chair, I cannot help the sadness that fills my heart. The absence of him, the coldness of the silence in the room and the now slow movements of the minute hand on my watch making me feel hopeless.

       I take a deep breath. Maybe next Tuesday I will tell him it’s all over. There’s no more us. That I cannot continue to live in a borrowed dream.

     When I come out of the shower, I shiver from the sudden blast of cold air in the room. I grab a dry towel from the rack in the bathroom and pick up my phone. There’s a message from him. It’s a photo. The wide boulevard framing him, the burst of purple in the top half of the picture. A smile on his face. For a moment, I wonder about the significance of the image. That’s when I see the purple blur peeking from behind his jacket pocket. I thought he had forgotten the flower. It makes me smile. This gesture of his. Its tenderness catches me unawares. 

I type a message to him. “I always feel hopeful when the Jacaranda blooms.”

He replies immediately. “I love you.”

       And that feeling, like a nagging itch bothers me again. Safe and trapped. I shake my head to dissipate the uneasiness that I feel. The canopy of Jacaranda covers my view of the street below as I look down from the window. I slowly dress myself and arrange my hair before I open the door of the room. It’s bitter-sweet and I know I’m living on the precipice of something dangerous. As the lock shuts behind me with a click and I stand in the carpeted hallway; the line of closed doors makes me feel suddenly alone.  Then the realization that I will meet him again next Tuesday comes naturally to my mind. Same as usual.

Bitter Sweet Mole

Jorge felt the pain course up through his wrists to his arms as he stirred the thick dark brown sauce simmering in the large clay cauldron. The long handled spatula he held with both hands had to be in constant motion to make sure that the sauce did not get burnt. The kitchen smelt of the wondrous blend of the countless ingredients that went into the mole, the aroma pungent and mouth-watering at the same time. At La Santa Elena, they made molethe old-fashioned way; no metal spoons or cauldrons here and all the spices were ground and mixed by hand. Senor Bernado, the head chef in the restaurant made sure that no one cut corners. There was no room for laziness in his kitchen. 

These were also the moments that Jorge would let his mind wonder and rest on those memories of his mother and grandmother as they stood over a similar clay cauldron; their beautiful brown faces bent over the pot and their arms sinewy and strong as they stirred the sauce. His father had left a few months after his younger brother had been born and with no means to support two young children Elia had moved back to Oaxaca from Mexico City to the safety of her mother’s house. That was when Maria had brought out the large clay cauldron from the small shack that stood in one corner of the garden; the delicate pattern of white flowers almost faded and burnt black in places but the cauldron still thick, heavy and ready to be used. She had asked Jorge to help carry it to the kitchen, his seven-year-old face already showing signs of hardship. The unexpected weight of the cauldron had made him look at his grandmother’s face in surprise. Elia had looked up from the child in her arms as her mother stood over the cauldron and then looked at her with an expression of determination.

“We will cook and sell food at the market……… and we will make sure these children and you have enough to eat.” Maria had said, her voice deep from age.

Elia burst out crying, her slim shoulder’s shaking from her sobs. 

“There’s no time for tears.” Maria had said kindly. “You have these two children to take care of……”

Elia nodded her head weakly as she tried to control her sorrow. Jorge stood next to his mother, his small hand on her shoulder trying to comfort her. 

“But mother, we don’t even have money to buy the ingredients……how are we going to start?” Elia had said.

“Don’t you worry your head about that. For now, tend to your children and I will take care of that. It will be hard work but this is what we have……this is our heritage.”

The younger woman nodded her head in agreement. There was very little to do but listen to her mother. It was she who had chosen to move to Mexico City with Diego despite her mother’s protests. At that time, it had been an act of rebellion; moving away from the small village she had known all her life, marrying a man from Mexico City, and the promise of better opportunities for them both. And now all she was left with were her children; the traces of their father in their light brown skins and hair and the memories of a love that she had thought would last a life time. 

Jorge remembers the look of acceptance and understanding between the two women; Doña Maria had forgiven her daughter’s foolhardiness and Elia had finally accepted her mother’s wisdom. 

                                                                                  ****

Jorge was startled as he felt a tap on his shoulder. It was Senor Bernado; a grim expression on his face. With a jerk Jorge started to stir the mole again. It had become thick and hard to stir, there was a faint smell of burnt spices in the air. 

“Stop daydreaming!” Bernado yelled at him as he glared at the younger man. 

“So sorry….” Jorge muttered as he pushed harder with the spatula to scrape the bottom of the cauldron, trying his best to make sure the moledid not get burnt. His grandmother would have asked him to start all over again, insisted that he grind the spices and make the paste from scratch, costing him an entire day’s work. He sighed in relief as no burnt clumps of sauce appeared on the top of the gently bubbling sauce. 

“You lucky bastard! Don’t fall asleep on the job again.” Bernado said as he walked away from him. There would have been no mercy from the chef if he had indeed burnt the sauce. Jorge was making the most popular of the them, mole rojo. It had taken him many years before he could gain the trust of Don Bernado who had finally allowed him to make that most beloved of sauces. He shook his head in disbelief as he wondered how he had been so absent minded, all his hard work and effort could have been thrown away in one moment.

Samuel, who was working next to Jorge looked at him with an expression of mock horror on his face. He was making the pipianmole; that beautiful earthy green sauce, its spicy and nutty flavors melding together to perfection. It had always been Jorge’s favorite; pipian moleover chicken and white rice made by his mother for his birthday. 

“Yo brother, that was a close shave!  Bernado would have had your hide for that rookie mistake.” Samuel winked exaggeratedly.

“You can joke but I shouldn’t have been distracted like that…. He was right to berate me.”

“Urgh……only youwould say that!” Samuel said tutting as he added more energy into each stroke of the ladle. “You kiss-ass!” He muttered under his breath.

Jorge simply chuckled. They had been friends for more than five years, most of their time together spent in the semi-dark cavern of the kitchen of the restaurant. Samuel who saw himself as an expert of the city, had taken Jorge under his wing as soon as they had met. It was he who had introduced him to El Centro, the bustling center of the city with its maze of side streets where you could find anything you were looking for, and to the charms of Zona Rosa, the red-light district where he had seen his first night club. It was also Samuel who had introduced him to Natalia, her light complexion and soft brown hair immediately grabbing Jorge’s attention. And when Natalia had ended their relationship, when Jorge had gone into a stupor fueled by beer and self-pity, it was Samuel who had pulled him out of his bed and shoved him under the cold shower and taken him out to get a meal. 

                                                                       ****

A week after Elia had moved back to her mother’s house she had begun selling moleat the market in the town. Her mother had already spoken to Silvio, the elderly cab driver who lived two houses down to help her transport the molethey had prepared to the market. The car, an ancient Chevy, was rusty and unwieldy, and Silvio with his skinny old-man’s body seemed to be swallowed up by the giant insides of the vehicle. The first day, as Elia sat in the back seat of the car, her hands firmly on the containers filled with food, she was startled as the car came to life with a terrible rumble. But after a few seconds it began to move with a jolt and they were on their way to the town. For the first time in her life she had had to leave her children behind; the weeping face of her younger child and the stoic expression of her eldest making her heart break. At least they were with hermother, she said to herself to comfort her own overwhelming maternal instinct.

That first week she had felt humiliated as she waited on a corner of the public market; her carefully prepared wares on the floor ignored by those walking by her and the looks of animosity from the other sellers. It had been a harsh introduction to reality; single motherhood and becoming the breadwinner of the family. Her husband’s job in Mexico City as a security guard working in a condominium had sheltered her from the burden of earning a living. But now she was responsible for putting food on the table for her children. She had sighed deeply as she looked at the beautiful shades of the different moles, their glory going to waste in the harsh midday heat. She wished she could tell all the passersby the effort and love her mother and she had put into the preparation, that it was not simply food, a sauce to accompany meat but the soul of her people.  As she sat in the backseat of the old Chevy with Silvio’s chatter in the background all she could think of was the empty bellies of her children and that she had failed as a mother. 

Doña Maria came out to help her unload all the food. The two women silently exchanged looks as they brought in the plastic containers and clay pots containing the food into the house; on one a look of dejectedness, and on the other a look of quiet determination. Doña Maria, gently touched the arm of her daughter, as if with that gesture she could transfer her strength and wisdom as Elia stifled her sobs. 

“Don’t worry……. we will make do. We always have. Your children won’t go hungry. I will make sure of that until I live but youmust never give up. Tomorrow morning you wake up and go to the market again. Silvio has promised to help us as much as he can and with the grace of Mother Mary, you will soon start selling and making money.” 

“Mama, but I don’t know how longIcan go on like this………the humiliation, the feeling of failure is too much to take.”

“You can’t think like that……. you can’t let those thoughts take over you. Think of the children. You are their mother andfather now. You are the person they look up to and if you want to bring up those boys to become good people……youhave to strive, youhave to swallow your own pride and youhave to keep going.”

Elia shook her head in despair. That night as she lay next to her children; Mateo suckling at her breast, his eyes half closed in sleep and Jorge sleeping with his little-boy’s-body pressed close to her own for comfort, she knew that there would be no relief for her. The entire weight of her responsibilities seemed to converge on her at that moment, the small room that she shared with her mother filling up with her own unfulfilled dreams, each fighting for space. Through the night she had wrestled with her own thoughts, battling her own self-doubts. When she woke up the next morning, Elia had felt empty like something within her had been expelled. And as she dressed herself to return to the market, Jorge who had been sleeping stirred and looked at her with a blank gaze. 

“Mama, where are you going?” he had asked, his voice drenched in sleep.

“To the market, my son.”

“Let me come with you……. I want to help.” He had said standing up groggily.

“But what about staying with your grandmother?”

“I’m bored and besides I want to help……. I’m a big boy now.” Jorge had said, stifling a yawn as he wore a pair of shorts. Looking at her son’s face, she could see the determination of her own mother. 

“Hmmmmmm…. okay.” She had said, thinking that he would probably get bored and decide not to join her the next day. Jorge had smiled and looked at his mother’s face with adoration. His seven-year-old mind already beginning to comprehend the gravity of their circumstances.

                                                                             ****

When he first returned to Mexico City as a young man, all he had was an address to his aunt’s house written on a piece of paper in his mother’s careful handwriting. As he walked, trying his best to navigate the confusing maze of streets, Jorge had felt threatened by the immensity of the city. He had tried calling the phone number next to the address, but had got no answer. His only option had been to find her apartment by himself. 

 After an hour of walking when he had finally found her apartment, Janet had hugged him briefly and showed him the small room that would become his bedroom. While he longed to speak to her and know more about his father Janet continued to speak only in monosyllables, rarely giving away any information about his father. All Jorge knew was that Diego had somehow crossed the border to Texas and had found work as a farmworker. It had been thirteen years since he had lived there and that he had a family of his own. He had caught his aunt glancing at him to see his reaction once she told him about his father, and Jorge had done his best to hide his emotions; his sense of pride overpowering his sadness.

Janet’s husband, a large, boisterous man had taken pity on the young man.  Unlike his aunt, it was he who had volunteered to help Jorge to find a job. The first night they had met Victor had offered him a beer.

“So, son what are your skills? What is it that you do best?” Victor had asked, his breath smelling of beer. 

“Um………I can cook and I’m hardworking.” Jorge had said suddenly feeling unsure himself.

“What can you cook?”

“Any kind of mole………any kind of dish from Oaxaca.”

“Hmmmmmm……. all seven of them?” Victor had asked, his own appetite for good food making his mouth water. “Maybe you can make some for us one of these days.” He added chuckling.

“Of course, Uncle. Yes, I can make all of them and more……”

“Okay……let me find out what I can do for you. I might have a friend who might be able to help you but I guarantee you it’s going to be hard work.” 

“I’m used to hard work. I’ve helped my mother and grandmother make food to sell at the market every day…… I’m not afraid of hard work.” Jorge had said feeling hopeful. Victor had patted him on the shoulder and grunted his approval. 

Two weeks later he had found himself in the spacious kitchen of La Santa Elena, the large terracotta cauldrons much like the one’s he knew from his grandmother’s kitchen and the aromas that stung and welcomed his nostrils, felt familiar like good friends. His first feelings had been of happiness until he met Senor Bernado, the head chef of the restaurant. The man had sized him up with one look and had ordered him to clean all the dirty dishes that had been piled up in the sink. 

“This is not some taqueria on the street okay……. this is a proper restaurant and we have a reputation to keep. So, anything you do has so be done perfectly.  We don’t cut corners here, no short cuts……you got it? And that applies for washing dishes too.” The man had said wagging a long skinny finger at him. Jorge had breathed deeply before nodding his head. He knew that he would have to gain the confidence of this man before he would even be allowed near a cauldron of fragrant mole, the hierarchy of the kitchen having already been established. Jorge had bowed his head and nodded in agreement. 

And as he had predicted it had taken him a full year before he could help with the preparation of the moleand another year before he could oversee making them. All the while he had hardly been able to visit his mother and brother; working through the weekends with Monday his only day of rest. After the first year, he had got used to the distance, finally saving enough money to send to his mother so she could make the trip to Mexico City. 

Jorge still lived in the cramped room in his aunt’s house and when his mother visited he gave her the bed and slept on the floor. Despite the cold reception of his aunt, Elia was pleased to see her son thriving in a city that she felt she could never belong. Her own memories and impressions of it shaded by her failed marriage to Jorge’s father.  Looking at the face of her eldest child she recalled his determination in joining her at the market that first morning, his small hand in her own as they walked to Silvio’s car. That was also the first day that she sold the food she had prepared. Speaking in a soft voice that night she had told her mother that she thought Jorge had brought luck to her that day. A smile of pride crossed her face as she gently brushed away the hair from her sleeping child’s forehead. And even though Jorge had started school the next month he had always shown a preference for helping his mother and grandmother, finding every excuse possible to skip school to join his mother at the market.

It was Mateo who seemed to resemble their father the most; his handsome features and café-con-leche skin and quick wit meant that he could charm anyone he met. While Jorge would falter, and struggle with speaking to a girl, Mateo with his winning smile and cheeky jokes would easily gain her confidence. Unlike Jorge, Mateo refused to help his mother and grandmother with the family business choosing instead to focus solely on his school work. Once when his grandmother had reprimanded him about not supporting the family, he had argued that he planned to complete school and find work in Mexico City as soon as possible. He had only been sixteen at that time, but Elia could already see the adventurous free-sprit of his father in her youngest son.  And she knew that when the time came there would be no stopping him from leaving the safety of his home and family.

                                                                          ****

In Jorge’s seventh year of working at La Santa Elena, his grandmother died. That was also the year that his girlfriend of two years had decided to end their relationship. It was also the year that Jorge found out that his brother Mateo had reunited with their father and had been welcomed into his home. For months, Jorge could feel the weight of all his troubles gathering strength, their collective forces overwhelming his mind and body like a disease coursing through his blood. That was when he had drunk himself into oblivion one weekend, a month after Natalia had left him. That was when Samuel had to push him under the cold shower in the small bathroom that November, the sky steel gray and the air cold and unforgiving, to bring him to his senses and wash off the caked vomit from his body and hair.  He had cried in his friend’s arms; tears of mourning for his grandmother, tears of heartbreak for Natalia and finally tears of abandonment for his father. The next morning, he had woken up to the sound of his aunt’s voice outside his door calling for him to wake up. For the first time since he had lived in her home she had made breakfast for him; chilaquiles with spicy green sauce, fried eggs, fried tortilla chips and plenty of queso fresco. He had looked at the dish on the table and at her face in amazement, unable to contain his surprise. She had simply patted him on the back.  Jorge savored the food with relish; enjoying that unexpected instance of his aunt’s affection. 

The next year, Jorge was made sous-chef at the restaurant and he had called his mother on the phone he had bought for her and had told her the news. There had been pride in his voice as he told Elia the news, imagining her face lighting up in the confines of the small kitchen of their grandmother’s house. She still prepared moleas she used to, only now she had a young woman from the neighborhood to help her with grinding the spices and stirring the sauce, arthritis over the years having made her fingers numb and crooked. There were still days that Senor Bernado would yell at him but it no longer felt like an insult or an accusation. Instead he would focus on watching the older man as he went about managing the kitchen, learning as much as he could.

He had wanted to call his brother and tell him the news, and yet some strange stirring within him had stopped him from doing so.  Was it pride? Or was it jealousy? He wasn’t sure. That evening as he completed his shift and walked out onto the sidewalk from the back entrance of the restaurant, Jorge once again thought about calling Mateo. There was already a small crowd of customers waiting to be seated for the dinner service; the men in their smart clothes and the women with their faces and hair made-up perfectly for the evening stood chatting and laughing on the side walk. He stood for a moment and watched them; these beings from a different world, everything about them oozing privilege and money. He Immediately felt an outsider in their world. Did they know it was he that made their food? That it was he who made the beautiful sauces that would be served to them on elaborately garnished plates? 

Jorge shook his head to brush off thoughts he knew were futile. He knew the truth just as they did. They would never know. As he turned the opposite direction to walk to the bus stop, he felt at peace. He pulled out his phone from his pocket and dialed his brothers number. As usual it took a while to connect, as he imagined the lines connecting across the border. He wondered what his brother was doing at that moment. After a few minutes, there was a clicking sound as someone picked up the phone on the other end. 

“Hello….” he said hesitantly.

“Hello……. who is this?”  A man’s voice answered, his Spanish accent thickly laced with traces from his homeland.

“Jorge……. where’s Mateo?” 

“Jorge?” The man’s voice repeated his name, lingering on the syllables.

“Yea……. who are you? Isn’t this Mateo’s phone?” Jorge asked concerned now.

“Are you calling from Mexico City?”

“Yes, I am……but what is it to you?” Jorge asked, feeling annoyed by the man’s questions.

“It’s your father.” 

“Who?” 

“Your father, Jorge. You can tell me the message for Mateo.” The man said matter-of-factly.

“Papa?” Jorge asked, feeling completely disarmed, his voice reverting to that of his seven-year-old self. 

“Yes……. it’s me. I—I know we haven’t spoken in a very long time.”

As he listened to his father’s voice, Jorge felt a waves of emotion rush to his mind; anger, sadness, frustration, and then happiness. He could no longer remember what his father sounded like, nor what he looked like. And for the longest time as a child he had tried to hold onto his memories of his father’s face which were eventually replaced by a distorted collection of fragmented memories. 

“I-----I just wanted to tell him that I got promoted to sous-chef at the restaurant.”

For a moment, there was only silence on the other end and then he heard his father breathe, choppy as if he was struggling.

“Are you okay Papi?”

“Yes……yes I am. I just couldn’t help myself.” Diego said, his voice heavy with sobs. 

As Jorge stood on the sidewalk, his phone in his ear, he suddenly felt his breath stop and his heart race at the same time. These were the words he had been waiting to hear for so long and yet, instead of wanting to yell back at the man who had abandoned him all he wanted to do was to hug him, to feel his father’s embrace and to see pride in his eyes.

Magical Circles

Arundati woke up to the dream of the garden, the garden of forking paths. As she sat up in her bed she felt the t-shirt she was wearing was damp and sticking to her back like a second skin. She looked up at the ceiling, the blades of the fan above her was an indistinct blur of white. The soft rustle of loose paper on her desk as they danced to the waves of air flowing down from the fan seemed distant. She imagined a whirlpool of air being pushed down towards her; a violent cone of energy enveloping and consuming her. And then an image flashed in her mind. It lasted less than a second: a man consumed by an explosive, fast burning fire, his own skin and flesh providing the fuel, his arms flailing helplessly as he falls to the ground. At that very moment the hairs on her body stood at attention and her heart raced, thumping against her rib cage like a maddened animal trying to escape. Her mouth opened to scream and instead of sound what escaped from her was the soft screech of her breath leaving her body and the hoarse sound of her pain as she stopped breathing. As her body fell back onto the bed, she inhaled her next breath, tears started flowing from her eyes; large singular globules.

This was still a good day.

Gone were the days when she woke up to physical pain, visceral surging through her body as she woke up from her nightmares. Gone were the days when she could barely will herself to get up from bed, her limbs feeling like iron rods weighing her down. Gone were the days when her face felt numb from the crying and intermittent screams that her body produced all day long. Gone were those days.

But still there was no peace for her. The very thought was the furthest from her mind, like an unknown path that lay ahead yet completely invisible to her. She had no knowledge of it. For now, all she could hope for was a lessening of the rawness of her pain.

Tragedy. Tragic.

Those were the words she kept hearing all around her. They enveloped every breath she took and walked by her with every step she took. Those were the words that described her now. A creature to be pitied and sighed over. The subject of conversations and morbid ruminations. That’s all she was reduced to.

Arundati. Arun.

Where was she?

Lost.

No, just somewhere between loss and survival.

Once upon a time, somewhere among the many forked paths that had lay ahead of her, she had chosen this one path.

Arundati had woken up one morning to the decision that she would not step out of the confines of her house. Surprising her parents with her decision at the breakfast table, their bread and tea going cold as they looked at her determined face making a proclamation. Her mother had attempted an argument only to be stopped by a touch of her husband’s hand on her forearm and a look in his eyes that said “don’t”. There were tears as Arundati spoke, sitting in her eyes like pools drowning her vision.

“I won’t be going to work anymore. I’ve already written an email to my head of department. I won’t leave the house for any reason. All I ask is for you to understand my decision. It’s for the best.” She looked at her parents, their surprise struck faces looking at her silently. As she waited she watched the expression on her mother’s face as she opened her mouth to speak and her father’s gesture, and she knew they too were in pain. There was silence for a few  more minutes, the only sound the steady murmuring of the kitchen fridge. A sound that would have normally gone unnoticed now seemingly deafening in the dead air of the room.

“Arundati………” Her father began. “……… if you want to stay home for a couple of weeks and take it easy, I think that would actually be a good thing. You don’t have to quit your job for that. Take a vacation. And if you want we can go somewhere out of town. You’ve hardly taken time for yourself since….” Her father stopped short of completing the sentence and looked down at his plate.

“Thaththa, I’m not talking about a vacation. I’m talking about never stepping out of this house.” Arundati said, her voice tense as she spoke the last sentence.

“What do you mean? You are going to become a hermit? Quit your job, cut yourself off from your friends and family?” Her mother finally spoke, words spilling out of her mouth uncontrollably.

“Yes. That’s exactly what I mean.” Arundati said, locking her gaze with her mother’s. There had always been tension between the them, an existential friction between two very different beings. As a teenager, she had envied the relationship between her mother and elder sister, Nirmala. But as an adult she had come to understand and accept the fragile peace she had managed to achieve with her mother. And when she had told the family of her relationship with Gemunu, there had been a sea-change in her mother. The match between her and Gemunu had been perfect in the eyes of her family. Her mother had doted over the young man that she had brought home one Sunday afternoon for tea and who had then continued to visit her parents frequently ever since. For what felt like the first time in her life, Arundati had basked in the approval of her mother, the glow of it overshadowing the roughness of their relationship up to that moment.

But once again she felt she was at loggerheads with the woman who gave birth to her.

“You cannot make decisions like that. Don’t you know it affects everyone? Everyone!” Kamalini said, controlling what she knew to be anger bubbling inside of her. It was a strange emotion; her love for her youngest had always been one that was tinged with a stain of regret. Arundati had always been the one to question her and challenge her place as a mother. Unlike her eldest child, Arundati was unpredictable, her fiery nature unbridled at times had made Kamalini question her worth as a mother. They had always fought, sometimes openly but more often in the form of a war of attrition, each knowing the other’s weaknesses all too well. Neither a clear victor, leaving them both frustrated.

“I know, mother. But this is what I need right now. All I’m asking is for you understand my decision.” Arundati said, this time her tone softer and compliant. She looked to her father who had been silent all this time.

“Thaththa, are you on my side? I need you to understand that this is the best decision for me. I can’t explain every bit of it but I need you both to have some faith in me. To trust me for once.” Ravi looked at his daughter and close to his heart he felt a knot gathering. It was a strange tangle of love and anger: love for his suffering child and anger at the circumstances of her life. He simply nodded his head, his own emotions flooding his mind.

“All I ask is that you let me be. I won’t bother you. I have some savings that I will use if I need anything. Although, I don’t expect my expenses to be considerable.” She continued matter-of-factly. She avoided looking at her mother and addressed her father exclusively. He had always been sympathetic to her and had at times played the role of the peace-maker between Arundati and her mother.

“I can’t let you throw away your life like that, Arun. I understand you are in pain but becoming a hermit is not the way to go about things. You have your whole life ahead of you. You are still…….”

“Stop!” Arundati said, her voice sharp, stopping her mother short of finishing her sentence. She stood up from the breakfast table, the piece of bread on the edge of her plate falling to the ground from the force of her movement.

“Arundati…….” Her father called out to her as she climbed the stairs. There was no loud bang as she closed the door of her room, only the silence that flooded the house as both parents stared at the food in their plates, each lost in their own thoughts. It was a silence that was consuming the house, masquerading as a substitute for loss.

Arundati.

She filled her days with silence and solitude, hardly stepping out of her room even for meals choosing instead to have her food in her room or in the night once everyone had gone to sleep.  The only thing she seemed to enjoy was the peace of her nightly meals; the whirring sound of the fridge keeping her company as she ate the morning’s leftover bread and seeni sambol, a spicy dish of caramelized red onions mixed made with turmeric and red chili flakes; an unlikely mix of sweet and spicy in a dish so humble. It was a strange act of solitude; her consuming of food. Her tears stained the white table cloth on the kitchen table. The taste of the food mingling with the punishment she felt she deserved.

There were days where she wondered if he had transformed into a spirit and had taken possession of her. Lying in her bed in the darkness, there were nights where she imagined a great weight upon her chest, paralyzing her, her mind struggling hopelessly to escape from whatever it was that was keeping her captive and then in a flash she would see his face. The face of the man she was to marry, the face of the man who would have been a father of her children. And then the great weight would be lifted, liberating her. It left her confused. Had he indeed become a restless soul that had taken to haunting her or was this her mind fueled by sadness falling apart in chewable bites? Would there be anything left of her at the end of this ordeal?

She had asked her mother to take away all the photos she had of him from her room. Next she deleted the photos in her laptop; her mind cold and angry. That’s what she felt in those early days. Anger: at herself, at the men who set off the destruction, at her family and at Gemunu. And at the end of that; coldness. It took a week for that numbness to melt away into grief. The effects of the sleeping pills her family doctor had prescribed fading away leaving her stranded with her own sorrow.

She still remembers clearly, speaking with clarity through her tears and screams, begging for something to relieve her of the pain. Her mother hugging her tight as her father dialed the number of the doctor. The look of terror in his eyes as he watched his child breaking at the seams.

She also remembers the oblivion of sleep, as her tired, tear stained body fell asleep for what felt like an eternity on the living room sofa. She also remembers hearing soft whispers as her mother and sister kept vigil over her. And finally, there was the memory of waking up and knowing that her heart was still broken and that Gemunu was dead.

Gemunu.

He was not an exception. There were many who had died that day. The bomb had ripped through the lobby of the busy shopping center; indiscriminate and punishing. The ball-bearings packed into the explosives fanning out like a macabre show of power, moving through skin, bones and soft organs finding their way onto the columns and walls, lodging themselves in strange patterns that would remain for weeks after. Yet another act of violence, yet another show of might. Fifty-three souls in total. Not counting the thousands upon thousands that had become statistics in a civil war that had spanned three decades. Yes, he was not an exception. But then. He was her exception. As the news of the bomb blast started flooding in, someone called her father and told him to turn on the TV. Arundati stood transfixed in front of the screen, as the images lighted up her face. As if struck by someone she had picked up her phone that had been lying on the dining table; that’s when she saw his text message. She immediately dialed his number and listened to the dial tone.  Then she saw the image that made her drop her phone to the ground. It was of a man flailing helplessly as his body was consumed by fire only to fall on the sidewalk, a burning heap of human flesh. And she knew.

She knew as her mouth opened to scream his name, over and over again until her voice became hoarse from the effort. She knew as her body fell to the ground and as she curled her body up into a tight ball of pain. Her mind realizing and not realizing at the same instant. Her mind accepting and rejecting at the same time. Every cell in her body flooding with pain.

Yes, he was not an exception. But he was her exception.

Gemunu with his dimpled smile and easy laughter, his unruly curly hair and his love of crème caramel. He had taken her by surprise that day as he spoke to her, the sound of the band playing eighties favorites as the wedding guests began to dance with gusto, with the confidence of a man who seemed to know what lay ahead for him. They were an unlikely paring; with his calmness, next to her fieriness. Or maybe it was the best possible match for each other. For the first time in her life she had felt accepted for who she was and for the first time in his life he was forced to shake the conventions of his own thinking. When he proposed to her, he did not even have a ring to give her. He had been mulling over it, considering the best moment to ask her only to be completely taken by surprise by his own impulsiveness. The next morning, they had gone to a jewelry shop to buy a ring, both giddy with happiness. The bright lights overhead and the glittering baubles in their glass boxes in the jewelry store intoxicating them with their sheen. She had chosen the simplest of the rings, the one that shone the least. He had protested at her choice but then let her choose.

Gemunu with his easy laughter that spread to his eyes. There had been no coercion. There had been no threats. She had chosen the path that lead her to this moment. The moment where her life had come to a standstill.

The moment where she cried at the subtle taste of stale bread and something else, as she choked on every bite that she took savoring the spicy-sweetness of the caramelized onions burning the surface of her tongue. The solitude of the kitchen table and the gentle whirr of the fridge her only companions. The memories of sharing the very same flavors with the man who she watched burn to death, somehow felt like a penance than a pleasure. The food devoid of its former glory, every bite an act of punishment.

This was where her life stood still.

 As the minutes, hours and days melded together Arundati and her parents fell into a strange but familiar pattern. With that the questions fueled by curiosity, phone calls of inquiry and family gossip died down as well. This was as close to being normal as they could ever be. The only break in the routine were the visits by Nirmala. It was only when her children visited that Arundati would come down to the living room and spend time with the rest of the family. Amid her chatter with the children, her parents and sister would exchange glances, seeing glimpses of the young woman they knew. But once her nieces left the house Arundati would retreat to her room and shut the door behind her.

The first time she noticed a change was after one such visit by her sister. Playing with her nieces she could almost forget Gemunu, his face blurring amidst the noise and playful chatter. She had also noticed the looks on her parents’ faces, a glimpse of hope as they watched their child seemingly normal. But once the children had left and the house settled into its old familiar silence, memories of Gemunu would come back to her with added force, as if those moments where she didn’t think of him were being compensated.

It had started gradually: the tingling sensation around her nose whenever she smelled food, the feeling of dizziness around familiar smells and finally the flashes of images in the early hours of the morning. They were subtle enough that she was unsure if they were imagined or true. As her sensitivity to smell increased, so did the intensity of the images she saw in the pre-dawn light of her room. By the time she became completely aware of a change within her, she had already come to understand the onset of what she would experience.

She would wake up covered in sweat, only to have her body paralyzed as she watched an image flash in front of her. The smell of burning flesh and smoke lingering on even after it had passed. For the rest of the day the scent traveled with her, a steady, haunting reminder of what she had witnessed.

That morning she had woken up, her cotton t-shirt stuck to her back like a second skin. It was still dark outside and as she waited for what she knew was to come she looked up at the ceiling. As her eyes got accustomed to the dark she could make out the faint circle made by the white fan blades as they cut through the air in the room. She imagined a whirlpool of air being dragged down towards her and she at the center of the turmoil.

And then she saw it.

A man consumed by a fast burning fire, his own skin and fat providing the fuel for the flames that were engulfing him just before he collapsed onto the sidewalk and then into nothing.

It was brief but this time she knew it was not a memory. This time she was sure she had been present at that moment in time. She had felt a burning sensation in her nose from the smoke and her ears had caught the sounds of mayhem; screams of pain and shock and the steady sound of human flesh and objects being consumed by the fire. She knew this time was different as she smelled her hair and her clothes, the undeniable smell of burning flesh imprinted on them. And all she could do was scream in silence. Her pain too strong to be contained and her body too fragile to respond.

After that, there was only oblivion. A vast nothingness.

And when she woke up from that soft, suffocating nothingness she ran to the bathroom and turned on the shower. As the water started trickling from the showerhead all she could think of was how to wash away the smell of smoke from her body. Taking off her clothes hastily she stepped into the shower cubicle and the cold water. As she watched the water slide off from her body she thought she could see it turn black as the residue from the smoke and ash was being washed off her. Once she was out of the shower she started to walk to her bedroom, a trail of water dripping from her wet hair and body. It was her mother’s reaction standing at the top of the flight of stairs, that made her realize she was completely naked. Arundati let her mother wrap her in a towel and take her to the bedroom. For the first time in weeks she had allowed her mother to touch her. She waited patiently as Kamalini dried her body and hair; both women silent as they allowed each other a moment that was primal; the bond between a mother and a child.

“Amma……” Arundati finally said as her mother looked at her face searching for answers. “I’m okay.”

“Okay? You were standing naked, dripping water in the middle of the corridor a few minutes ago. How can you be okay?” Kamalini said standing up and walking to the chest of drawers that contained her daughter’s clothes.

“I will be fine. It was just a passing moment……You don’t have to do this Amma.”

“What do you mean? Taking care of my child?” Kamalini said handing her a t-shirt, underwear and a pair of old jeans.

“No, the worrying. I will be fine. This may not be what you want me to be but I’m comfortable with who I am. Doesn’t that matter?”

“Then, who are you Arundati? Where is my child? The one who could fill up a room with her presence, the one who could make everyone smile even if they didn’t want to. Now, it’s as if you only want to take up as little space as possible.”

“I don’t know where she is, Amma.” Arundati said, her voice small and childlike. Kamalini hugged her daughter. Arundati’s naked body somehow even more fragile than Kamalini could remember, the bones protruding and her skin papery.

“Whatever it is you are doing……please stop it. We need you back.” Kamalini said facing her daughter. Instead of responding Arundati kissed her mother on the cheek, a gesture that was rare between the two women. When Kamalini left the room, Arundati allowed herself a moment to cry for herself and for her mother.

But somewhere deep inside her she knew that she was to revisit that day many more times in the days to come. She knew that this was simply the beginning, that she was drawing ominous magical circles in her mind. She knew that despite her own efforts she was caught in a spell, one that she could not break. And somewhere deep in her mind she thought she heard a voice that told her that it was okay, that it was okay for her to let go, to finally allow the loss to consume her body and mind. Loss of herself the only cure to her malady.

The Seedlings

They tried to bury us. They didn’t know we were seeds. - Mexican proverb.

Arun

He still remembers crouching behind the sofa, his hands shaking as he listened to the voices of the strange men that had come to their house. He was in a pair of shorts and a cotton t-shirt, a faded image of Superman that he liked to place his hand on as he fell asleep. Arun had wanted to wear one of his brother’s instead but his mother insisted. He also remembers his mother pleading, her sobs intersecting coherent words. There was only coldness in the voices of the men who spoke. Finally, he decided to peek, conjuring up courage to see what was happening. That was when he saw his brother for the last time. Krishna had stood tall and defiant as he was asked to go with the men to the police station. The men who were standing under the dim light of the porch looked ominous, their faces barely human in the shadows. But, there was one figure among them that would haunt Arun for the rest of his life. At first he was unsure of what he was seeing. The figure did not seem to have a face and instead all he could see was a featureless brown mass. It made the hairs on his arm stand on end. The boogeyman; the faceless, featureless monster of his nightmares. And before his young mind could understand anymore he heard the creature talk, a simple yes. Between the screams and shouts of his parents, his brother was dragged away, his skinny brown body flexing as he struggled to free himself from the clutches of the men. All Arun could do was to lie on the floor and curl himself up into a ball, his six-year-old mind trying to make sense of what he had just witnessed.

It was only years later that he found out that the boogeyman he saw that night was real and not a figment of his childhood imagination. Unlike the creature of his nightmares, this bogeyman was tortured and coerced into giving up names and nodding yes to identify his comrades. Arun also found out that these young men were made to wear a gunny sack on their faces to help them be anonymous, with just two holes for their eyes to see the unsuspecting victim. This was the bogeyman that walked silently through the Wednesday market on the main street of the village or through the muddy tracks of the town fair grounds, his mere presence cutting a pathway through the crowds, a miracle of sorts. Looking back, he remembers that it was indeed a strange time. A time of horror and bloodshed that had become part of everyday life; bodies burning on a funeral pyre of burning tires, the smell of burning flesh and rubber floating through the air as children walked to school, neatly placed decapitated heads around a pond of lotus blooms. An adult now, he still remembers the fear that was constant and running through his veins, the uncanny feeling of nights where the lights were extinguished on the whim of a group of men.

Not even fiction nor imagination could make up the strange disconnectedness of those times.

Krishna

His body now lay under layers of soil, leaves, branches and debris. He was now one among seventeen. Not a sign left of the blood, the pain or the fear that gripped those young men as they waited for death. Not a sign was left of the rush of adrenalin and mad frenzy of the men who stood, their hands shaking as they prepared to shoot the men in front of them, some not much younger than themselves. Not a sign. All that was left was the memory of the earth that bore the bodies of the seventeen young men, their flesh and bones becoming a part of the soil that wrapped them, their essence mingling with that of the soil around them.

They were the remnants of that strange time, stranger than the strangest of fiction. They were the proof that would not go away.

And they bided their time.

Arun

He smiles now as he sees the wall of his bedroom. Time stands still as he looks at the layers of photographs covering the wall next to his bed. Even after all these years his parents had not removed them from the wall, leaving them to yellow and age unmolested. A part of him wishes they had erased all traces of his lonely adolescence, but another small part of his heart was grateful they had not. Arun sat on the bed and faced the wall, looking carefully at the collage of randomly placed photos. He was looking for something. It was a photo of a young girl. Gently, he started to lift and move the photos, discovering layers underneath; a chronicle of his obsession.

In those days, he had been searching. Searching for the brother he had lost. Fueled by the deep shadows under his mother’s eyes and her unrelenting hope that Krishna would return, Arun had started taking photos of crowds. His own fragile hope that Krishna’s face would magically appear in a photo, changed but recognizable, and his parents finally exhaling that breath they had been holding for years thereby freeing him to breath on his own. But before his mind was consumed by his search, there had been a photo. It was of a young girl, not more than twelve years old, her hair lighting up in the afternoon sun, her eyes crinkling as she smiled for him. The girl next door who had been his friend through the years his parents searched frantically for their firstborn, an unlikely refuge from his own sadness and loss. When he had felt like a ghost, his parents looking right through him their own grief overwhelming their senses, it was Indira who had helped him feel like he was not a mere figment of his own imagination.

He still remembers taking the photo. The camera had been a gift from his uncle for his birthday, an expensive gift for a boy his age. His parents were stunned into silence as he was presented the camera, his uncle refusing to listen to their arguments about the expensive hobby. It was he who had provided Arun with the money when he needed to buy film or when he wanted to get the photos processed. It had been his uncle’s way of helping the teenager who was visibly suffering from the effects of his brother’s disappearance. The camera in turn had given Arun a means of contributing to the search. But more importantly it had given him a space to be himself, removed from his parents overwhelming sadness.

When he finally found the photo, it showed signs of being forgotten; the edges were bent and the color washed out. Yet, there she was, her smile somehow shining through the years. Arun smiled as he walked out to the living room of his parent’s house. Everything looked just as he had remembered as a teenager, the only difference being the flat-screen TV that he had bought for them when the old one had given out.

“Hey, I found it!” he said cheerfully as he held up the photo. His parents smiled and the young woman sitting on the couch with them turned around. She was blushing as she walked towards him, taking the photo in her hand.

“Oh geeze!” She said as she stared at her much younger self, the awkward grin and crinkly eyes of the young girl smiling in the photo.

“What do you mean? I took great photos even back then……your photo was one of my first.” He said taking it from her hand. She rolled her eyes comically and stuck her tongue out.

Arun wanted to kiss her then but, he resisted remembering that his parents were in the living room with them. Although he no longer lived in the same house and owned a small thriving business of his own there was still conventions he had to follow.

“She looks even prettier now.” Said his mother, smiling at the young woman standing next to him.

“Thank you, Auntie!” Indira said grinning, a slightly more adult version of her smile on the photo.

For the first time in his adult life Arun could feel things falling into place. Meeting Indira had been the catalyst; their chance encounter at a mutual friend’s birthday and their almost instant recognition of each other had rekindled his teenage affection for her. And to his surprise she had been the first to confess her feelings to him. And over the course of the year that they had known each other he could glimpse into the years in between her family moving away and their reunion, to the woman that she had become, shedding away features of the young girl he had known to becoming the woman he would fall in love with.

“Do you still think of Krishna?” She had asked him, only a month after they had met. Her boldness had taken him by surprise and he hesitated to find an answer.

“Yes……. I still do.” He had finally answered.

She had touched his arm gently, her face conveying that she had already known the answer.

“He will always be a part of your life.”

Arun nodded his head in agreement. Even though he had decided to stop his obsession of finding his brother, there was still times he would find himself scanning a crowd, his heart leapfrogging as he waited for a moment of recognition. He would then check himself, berating his own naivety. His own child-like hope of seeing Krishna again never giving him a chance to completely find his peace.

“You just need to accept that truth. It might help you move on.” Indira had said.

“I have moved on……” He protested.

She simply nodded in disagreement. At that moment, he had felt found-out as if she had invaded a deep private part of him without his permission.

Krishna

The hillside where the young men lay, the grave’s existence long forgotten had become a site for the expansion of the village temple. It had always been part of the land of the temple but for as long as anyone could remember it had been left to its own devices, the trees and the undergrowth running their roots ever deeper as the decades passed. Long forgotten, the land had been able to keep its secrets secure. But It was one of the men weeding the undergrowth that had hit a human skull, cracking it with the strength of the blow of the shovel. He had been trying to root out a large Castor tree that had grown unheeded, its roots running deep into the rich ochre soil. It was hard work in the mid-day sun, sweat pouring from the sides of his temples, he had been getting frustrated but once he realized what he had accidentally struck his expression changed to that of fear. There had always been rumors, spoken in the safety of one’s home, among family. Like many who lived through those strange years of the country’s history the man too had learned to turn a blind eye and a deaf ear to what he saw and heard around him. Everyone was complicit, even though many were not ever aware of their complicity. Caught between the government and the insurgents, ordinary people like Mahinda had no other option but to remain silent and hope that their sin of complicity would never be found out. That the horrors that he had witnessed and ignored would not visit him or his children in the future.

Quickly he squatted next to the skull, and started to move away the soil, much more gently this time. Once he was completely sure that he was looking at human remains he looked around him, as if he had been found out with his own secret. He placed his hand on his forehead and wondered what he should do. Around him the other men were busy, their arms and legs moving in coordinated movements as they cut through the thick undergrowth beneath the Rubber and Teak trees. They seemed to be unaware of his discovery. After a few minutes Mahinda decided to call out to the man working closest to him.

“What is it?” The man asked, his dark black hair matted with sweat.

“Come and look.” Mahinda said, almost hissing his words as he attempted to not alert the other men.

Jagath walked towards him, his curiosity now aroused by the expression and urgency shown by Mahinda. There had always been talk about the fact that the temple grounds held a hidden treasure left there by one of the noblemen of the village as he fled the advances of the bedraggled British army making their way to Kandy. Those had also been times of complicity and violence, each aristocrat vying for a foothold in a country that was about to become a British colony.

“What is it?” he asked again, this time his voice almost a whisper as he looked at the earth that had been cleared by the other man.

“It’s a skull.” Mahinda said, his eyes bulging as he said the words.

“What?” Jagath said in disbelief, his daydreams of hidden treasure dissipating into the humid air.

“Look…….” Mahinda said and pointed at the white bone emerging from the ochre earth, one empty eye socket staring into nothing.

That was when Jagath looked with alarm at the man next to him. He too was reminded of the stories that the empty land had been used as a sight for a mass grave during the insurgency. It had been 1987 and he had been a seventeen-year-old and like many young boys his age he was aware of the sentiments of rebellion and violence that was surging through the country. He knew that his parents had been fearful for his life, that he would become yet another statistic, one among many who had disappeared during that time. He had survived, mainly due to the machinations of his mother who had sent him to stay with a distant relative in Colombo, hoping that the life in the city would ensure that he would stay away from the company of the young men who had organized themselves in the village. He had left the village early one morning, catching the train from Kandy to Colombo, leaving behind his family and his friends, wearing what he thought was his cowardice as close to the ground as possible. When he returned to the village almost five years later, he had been thankful to his mother who he realized had saved his life. Some of the young boys he had grown up with had not survived that strange time, their bodies either burnt in pyres or buried without a trace.

“We have to tell the head priest of the temple and we shouldn’t do anything more. This is no longer our business.” He said to Mahinda.

“Whatever you say……let’s go then.”

The two men started walked briskly on the narrow cleared path through the undergrowth back to where the temple premises began. They quickly removed their worn rubber slippers and started walking barefoot over the thick white sand that covered most of the grounds. The sun had heated up the shiny crystals and it was almost unbearable to walk. The two men skipped over the heated sand, their soles burning at every touch and when they finally arrived at the building that housed the rooms where the monks lived, they sighed in relief as they stepped on the cool ochre earth. A young monk was sweeping the veranda. He looked up at the sound of the men panting.

“Yes?” He asked calmly.

“We need to speak to the head monk please……. it’s something important.”

“Is someone injured?” the monk asked, the broom motionless in his hands.

“No……. but this is important……please.” Mahinda said, speaking between great gulps of breath.

When the chief monk of the temple finally came out to meet the men, they were calmer, the initial rush of adrenalin had died down and they were now left with anxiety. The gravity of what they had discovered sinking in, both men stood silent, each contemplating the implications.

“Reverend, you must come……. I……we found a human skull.” Mahinda spoke as soon as he saw the monk appear at the doorway.

The monk, an elderly man who stood taller than both Jagath and Mahinda, took a deep breath. There was an expression of acceptance, as if the news that the two men just gave him was somehow a confirmation of his own deep seated worries. He simply nodded his head and started walking towards the edge of the temple grounds. Jagath and Mahinda followed behind him, their footsteps stumbling as they tried to keep pace with the stride of the taller man.

Arun

He had been at his favorite kottu shop when he saw the news broadcast, the images of the unearthed mass grave flashing on the TV screen mounted on the limited space of the wall facing him. It was a small shop; an oddity that provided both food and a random selection of groceries. He would drop in after work for a cheap cup of sweet cardamom tea and a couple of spicy vadai’s before heading to the annex he rented, the spiciness of the food complementing with the hot sweetness of the tea. It was a perfect way to end his work day. As he watched the images on the screen, something inside him stirred, an instinct. The first thought in his mind was Krishna. He stood up and walked closer to the TV. The loud chatter of the customers and the constant clanging of the metal blades hitting the metal hotplate as it chopped and mixed the pieces of roti, vegetables and meat that became the kottu to be served, assaulted his ears as he tried to listen to what was being said on the news. He felt frustrated as he failed to discern anything being said on the TV. Arun, walked out onto the pavement and called his parents. It was his mother who picked up and instinctively he knew that his mother that had already seen the news. She had been crying.

“Did you see…….”

“Yes.” She said immediately.

“I’m out and I couldn’t hear anything that was being said on the TV……this place too noisy.”

“The grave is in Kandy……. for now, they have only uncovered five skeletons but they think there’s more….” She continued, her voice becoming shaky as she spoke.

“Amma……” Arun said, his heartbreaking as he knew that his mother was enduring the loss of her eldest once more.

“I’m okay. If you can come home…….”

“Yes, I’m on my way.” Arun said.

As he hailed a tuk tuk from the busy street, he sighed deeply. The traffic was heavy on the Galle Road, and as the vehicle wiggled its way through cars and honking busses carving out the fastest route to his destination, Arun could not dispel the thought that his brother’s body was in that grave. Maybe this time around his family could find a means to move on, to find an existence that did not revolve around loss. For once he admitted the sense of relief he felt at the thought but, it was soon followed by the guilt that came inevitably in its wake. How could his thoughts be so selfish?

Krishna

As the chief monk of the temple started walking past the workers to the clearing where the skull was found, there was a deafening silence as everyone stopped their work and wondered what had happened.

“It’s here Reverend……” Mahinda walked ahead, and pointed at the root of the Castor tree that he had been digging out.

Immediately the monk bent down, his ochre robes touching the soil as he looked closely at what had emerged from the ground. By now the rest of the laborers were standing in a circle around the monk, with Mahinda and Jagath in the front row. There was an air of anticipation as they watched and waited for the monk to make a declaration.  And when he finally cleared his throat, there was a hush as everyone expected him to talk. Instead the monk simply stood up and looked around.

“Listen, there’s nothing more to see here……it’s not some macabre show. There’s human remains here and no matter who it is we have to show respect to the dead.” He said touching his forehead as he spoke.

“Do you think it’s from the times of the kings………maybe buried treasure.” One of the men quipped.

At that the monk looked angry as he scanned the faces of the men to see who had spoken. He took a deep breath.

“No…. it’s not from the times of the ancient kings and I doubt there’s any treasure here. Those are all legends told by our old folk, there’s hardly any proof to their stories. But, ……. what you see here is the remains of the times we live in, the horrors that we have all witnessed in this country. It’s a from a time when there was hardly any rule of law and violence and fear was the norm. So, don’t you dare disturb anything here………it’s out of our hands now.”

“But…….” Jagath said.

“I’m going to inform the police……. it’s their job now……. it’s their macabre job to figure out what exactly happened here.” At that the monk started walking back to the temple. The men moved out of his path respectfully, but as soon as he walked passed they started talking among themselves, their mingled whispers sounding like insects buzzing in the distance. While the other men talked among themselves, Jagath kneeled beside the skull. He touched its surface almost tenderly, imagining it belonging to a human being, a being made of flesh and blood. He thought about the young boys that he had known in his youth, those he left behind as he sat on that train one chilly morning thus, changing his fate. His vision started to blur as he felt a heavy burden fall upon him. And he could not stop the tears of loss; they were tears for an entire generation of youth whose frustrations and dreams had become the weapon for a few who craved power, and they were also tears for his own youth forever tinged by his sense of guilt at being alive to see the future.

Christmas Fireworks

From the window of the top floor apartment the city lights in the distance seemed to shimmer and stretched forever. On the highway that twisted by the looming apartment building, a never ending stream of cars. And at random moments the sky above the city bloomed with fireworks. People were celebrating in the city. It was only a week before Christmas, and inside the ample living-room of the apartment the consecutive rounds of tequila were starting to take its effect on the guests. The laugher and talk were at a fever pitch. By now people had already formed their cliques; their mini-tribes for the purpose of the evening. At times it seemed as if they were competing for space in the room, each speaking or laughing louder than the other. The cold breeze that came in through the open window did very little lighten the combined smells of perfume, food and alcohol.

Arundati smiled back at her husband as he waved at her from a small group of people at the far end of the room. She had made herself comfortable in the love seat next to the large tree covered in shiny baubles and fairy lights. No one it seemed wanted to be close to the Christmas tree. For her it felt like a bright refuge, the light  providing her with a way to hide in plain sight. She had already done her round of introductions and had nodded and smiled at the fact that she did not speak much Spanish. And now she was happy to watch her husband laughing and smiling; his grin wider and his jokes funnier in his own language. He was comfortable and she had learned to find her own comfort in seeing him in his own element.

There was always someone in parties like this who would want to speak with her in English, a hint of an American accent peeping through as they asked about her country. “So you speak Hindi?” They would ask smiling, finally finding something they could related to in the foreign woman they were making conversation with. She always felt a tinge of sadness as she eventually disappointed them with her lack of knowledge of that language with her brief practiced explanation that people did not speak Hindi in Sri Lanka. But of course, she had seen countless Bollywood movies and she could tell you plenty about her appreciation of the formulaic beauty of that cinema.

She loved her husband; there was no doubt theirs was a happy marriage. The fact that neither of them had ever felt a strong allegiance to their countries and cultures had helped them find a common ground in their marriage. Their common rootlessness had helped them find their grounding in their bond with each other.

Arundati had always prided herself in her chameleon abilities; blending in when she needed to, hiding in plain sight. But what she sometimes did not admit even to herself was that there were moments of loneliness; moments that reminded her that maybe she didn’t always do a good job of blending. That indeed, people did see her despite her best efforts.

“Are you okay?” Her husband walked towards her and asked. She could see the familiar look of concern in his eyes, almost apologetic for speaking in Spanish.

“Yes.” She smiled widely.

“Do you need anything? I’m sorry you are not getting to participate too much.”

“I’m enjoying myself. Don’t worry about me.”

“Are you sure?” He asked again as he glanced back at the group that he was with before.

“I’m fine.” She kissed him on the cheek. As he walked back to the animated talk in the group she started looking around the room. Was there anyone else like her? There were always outsiders in a party irrespective of language; someone who didn’t completely belong.

Sitting close to the window was one of the newcomers to the group. Arundati had already been introduced to him. Rohan; his name had stood out like a marker.

She had noticed the look of relief in his face when he realized she spoke as little Spanish as he did. A not-so-secret fraternity of language-aliens. And when she said her name his face lighted up.

“No, I’m not Indian. Sri Lankan…..close enough right?” She had laughed. The flash of disappointment on his face was not lost on her.

“Yes.” He had smiled exaggeratedly.

She had watched him moving across the room walking from group to group, his laugh louder than it needed to be, his friendliness spreading thicker than it was needed.  He was trying to make friends. At one point she heard someone openly making fun of his accent, emphasizing the roll of the “r”s. She waited to hear some protest from him but there was only his loud laughter.

There was always loss in blending in.

Rohan was now holding a bottle of beer in his hand and the expression on his face resembled defeat. Had he finally decided he could not find a space among the groups of people at the party; the circles they were standing in too close that he could not get a foothold? She felt an urge to walk up to him and strike a conversation but she hesitated. Should she risk being exposed? Her place next to the tree suddenly feeling comfortable.

Arundati instead looked beyond him to the city skyline; the monstrous spread that was Mexico City. A city that she now called home, a far reach from where she had grown up in. She was grateful for the days she felt she belonged, but she also knew the sense of smallness she felt; the city around her overwhelming and enveloping.  A giant succubus that feasts on the spirit of millions of migrants for its own lifeblood.

Once again there were fireworks lighting up the sky. Now they seemed small and lonely; acts of rebellion of individuals declaring their presence on the canvas of the hazy night sky. And as she moved her gaze away she instead caught the eyes of the man sitting next to the window. But this time she felt a jolt of electricity in her body. It was recognition. She was exposed; her loneliness, her vulnerability and her alien-ness. And in his gaze she saw who she was. She was the outsider.

He smiled weakly at her. She instinctively touched the soft protrusion of her belly. Will the life within her be treated with kindness- this complicated mix of races- Sri Lankan, Dominican and Mexican? Or will she lose herself in her otherness? Forever an alien, never finding that foothold.

By now the other guests had started to notice the fireworks, gathering closer to the window. She could no longer see Rohan who was engulfed in the newly formed group. But it also meant that she could no longer see beyond the window. Her husband was walking towards her again. He was smiling.

“Wanna go see the fireworks?” he said.

“Sure” She stood up carefully, feeling vulnerable. She was about to be exposed again.

Arundati touched her belly. Would this new soul within her do better at finding her place than her mother? In the least would she know when she was exposed as an imposter, a chameleon? Or would she be one of the brave lighting up the sky with fire even if it was for a brief moment in time?

As she got closer to the group she saw Rohan. He was smiling again, his confidence regained. And in that moment he was blending in; once again part of a group. He caught her eyes  and she realized that he could no longer see her. She too had once again camouflaged herself, a shape-shifting survivor.

By the time she could see outside the window to the skyline the fireworks had stopped. The crowd had already moved on, their interest satiated. And she looked out into the shimmering darkness and felt loss. She understood that rebellions and individuals could not last forever. That was a happy dream that would never come true.

Her husband was calling her name. Dinner was ready and the food was being served.

At that moment Arundati made a wish for her child. She hoped that her child would not be born a dreamer. But as she was turning around to walk back, she saw blooms of fire lighting up the sky again. And she sighed deeply knowing that this time her wish would not be granted. Maybe there could still be room for dreamers. Maybe the world would still leave space for the aliens, the outsiders, and the chameleons.